Question:
A friend of ours is 60 at christmas and we have all clubed together to get him a present. We have around £90 his wife says that he wants a digital camera. Now he does not have a pc. So he would be getting his photos developed at the shop.
I have been looking at the following cameras
Olympus c310zoom
Samsung digimax301
Which would you go for, as i don't have a clue. I just know that he wants a smallish camera, but a sturdy one. Any ideas would be appreciated.
Answers:
I don't have any particular recommendations about which camera is better but just wanted to point out that although it's possible to use a digital camera without a PC, I think he should seriously consider getting one, as he'll be extremely restricted!
Digital cameras store the information about photographs on memory cards. In order to keep the pictures files (to make further prints in future, for example) he'll need to have a lot of memory!
Most digital cameras have internal memory and/or can take some sort of external memory card (like CompactFlash, SD or xD etc..).
The Olympus c-310 zoom uses xD cards and comes with a 16 MB xD Picture Card. The Samsung digimax 301 has 16Mb internal memory and can use SD or MMC cards but doesn't come with an external card for free.
Now, 16MB isn't really that much - if he takes photographs and say the files are 1Mb each. He'd end up only being able to store 16 pictures before having to change memory cards.
Even if he had a PC, he'd probably need to buy an extra memory card anyway - but without a PC, he's going to need just a slightly bit more memory!
Digital cameras usually also have settings to lower the picture resolution and store pictures as smaller files - so he could squeeze more pictures onto the available memory that way too (though the picture quality won't be as good).
Just some things to consider before making your choice!