Picture Perfect

Technology expert Jon Kenton picks apart the digital camera market, suggesting the best ones to capture all your memories this vacation season.

With vacations on the horizon, you may be thinking about buying a new travel camera. Selecting a new camera can be daunting, as there are so many choices. Manufacturers are packing more and more features into their compact cameras, and with prices ranging from less than $100 to almost $1,000, what’s a savvy buyer to do?

Like any purchase decision, the best place to start is by listing the factors you care about. Is price important, or is there a specific feature you have your eye on? For some, the ability to take both photos and movies with the same camera is a must. If an awesome national park is in your future, you will want a camera that can take broad panoramas and then zoom in to take close-ups of people or wildlife.

Does this mean you need two or more cameras? Not at all. The camera manufacturers have created several travel-camera categories to make your decision a bit easier: compact point-and-shoot (less than $250), super-zoom ($250–$500), enthusiast ($500–$1000), and ruggedized (less than $350).

For price-conscious buyers, the compact point-and-shoot cameras are easy o use and include many of the features that travelers love. The Sony Cyber-shot W570 ($149 on Amazon), has a 16.1 megapixel sensor that allows for prints up to 13 x 9 inches and also take 720p HD movies. There is a 5X zoom, which is adequate for most situations, and a panorama mode in which the camera has the ability to stitch together several pictures into one wide one. In auto mode, the camera recognizes various scenes and selects the appropriate settings for you. It also includes image stabilization that helps to keep your pictures sharp. It will even recognize people in the picture and wait for everyone to be smiling before tripping the shutter. The Canon PowerShot ELPH 300 ($179 on Amazon) is another great choice.

Super Zoom cameras have a minimum 10X zoom range, and some can zoom up to a whopping 36X. These cameras are ideal when you just can’t get close to your subject and also have many of the features travelers need. For these cameras, the most important number is the optical-zoom rating. Cameras to consider are the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS10 (16X, starts at $199), Sony Cyber-shot HX100V (30X, $399), Canon Powershot SX40 (35X, $379), and Nikon Coolpix P500 (36X, $449). All these cameras take 1080p HD movies and feature image stabilization. Some have special features such as GPS (Nikon, Panasonic) or 3-D (Panasonic).

If you are a photo enthusiast, then you should check out the new Canon G1 X. It builds on the highly successful G series and looks very interesting. For those who already have a high-end DSLR but want something more compact to carry around during vacation, the G1 X is a place to start.

There is a great deal more camera information available on the Web. Two of my favorite websites for camera
reviews are dpreview.com and outdoorphotographer.com. When choosing a camera, I also highly recommend that after you do your homework online, you go to your local camera store or big-box outlet (e.g., Best Buy) and actually hold the camera to see how it feels in your hands. Happy shooting!