Equipment New camera!

Hi,

I desperately need a new camera (my last digital died on a fatal fall in january) and i have been using disposables and friends digitals since!

I have around 250eur to spend and can order from UK stores or Spanish stores. My requests arent high, all I would need is a camera where the flash loads quickly as I always used to miss out on spur of the moment pics with my old one whilst waiting for the flash to turn itself on. Aswell as this it really has to be pretty hardy, I drop them and it will get scratched to bits.

zoom isnt a necessity, but would be favourable. After this I am lost in the world of cameras and am hoping bit-tech can show me the light

One last thing is expandable memory, I dont get a chance to empty it often due to travelling, so I need to be able to have big memory included inside my budget, i can probably go to 300eur at a big push if its worth it and fills all the fields, 300 eur is about 200£ or 400$

Hope you guys can help me

Thanks,

Andy-

 

Hmmm... normally, I would suggest the Canon G7, since its got some decent image quality, and AWESOME controls with a friendly interface, but it is a bit more than your price range (around $700 CAD, or $5-600 USD or $475 Euro).

There's a cheaper camera - the Fujifilm F31 which is praised for its excellent (almost dSLR-class) noise handling. Personally, unless you're in it for portability and socialite style, forget the credit-card slim cameras that companies keep pushing, and ignore high megapixel ratings - it's just a bunch of rubbish through gimmicky marketing.

5-6 megapixels is enough for most applications and will print decent 8x10 enlargements or maybe even bigger. Look for noise handling and a decent lense which handles CA (purple and cyan fringing that shows up on edges of things) and sharpness.

DPreview.com is an excellent site with very thorough reviews if they manage to review the cameras you are interested in. They tend to focus on dSLRs, but they have a few compacts.

 

I'd recommend the canon powershot S series my S2-IS is quite a little package, super zoom a few pics a second a whole lot of camera for around the price you want to pay.
The only bad point about it is that the view trough the eye piece is digital (not straight out) like DSLR's so you tend to see a bit pixelized trough the view.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canons2is/