Buying Digital Cameras

I've spent an unfortunate amount of my recent spare time trying to choose a digital camera, and find a good deal on one of the models I want. I'm probably the least gadget savvy geek out there... even though I know what all the words mean, I don't really pay too much attention to the market and hardly ever buy gadgets. My frugality and my geekiness fought a long and bitter battle over a number of years, but ultimately the bank account put it's foot down and frugality won through. When you work in IT, it's amazing how many people ask you questions about all kinds of little gadgets- for example, people seem to expect me to know from memory where to find any feature in any mobile phone. I can still find it faster than them, but half the time I haven't even known phones could do what they asked- I've had the same phone since the stone age.

But not having a digital camera has become too frustrating, and I'm finally joining the bandwagon.

I don't know if you've ever looked online for digital cameras, but like a lot of popular web keywords, it's a complete spam-fest. Finding sites with actual opinions and sample photos amongst all the sites full of recycled press releases and search engine garbage can be a needle vs haystack situation. You see where this is going, to save you the trouble, I'm going to provide links to all the useful sites I found:-

steves-digicams.com have a lot of reviews, they can feel a little boiler-plate in places, but it's definitely a helpful site, and they have great sample pictures and movies.

megapixel.net is another good source of reviews, less focus on the sample pictures, but they show good examples of different kind of shots and options.

Yesterday, I realised that dpreview.com also has a lot of great reviews. I really wish I'd found this one earlier, but I think I got linked through to a press release or two there and assumed they were one of the spam sites.

Finally, I found a great forum at photocamel.com, which is shockingly busy, considering they only started a day or two ago. They already have 30 times more users than I've managed to get on my forums in 3 months...

By the way, I've pretty much settled on a Sony W5 or 7. I really wanted a Canon S2 IS, not least because of Chris Prillo's recommendation, but it's pricey and the size makes it impractical in probably 80% of the situations I'd want to use it in. Shame though, I would have loved to play with that 12x zoom and those cool image effects. I'm happy with the compromise of the Sony though, it's the first model I've been able to think about getting for a few days without changing my mind. It has a really nice hefty but compact build, the photos look great and the price is just an acceptably small amount more than I originally wanted to spend! The only downside is the memory stick format, I have an SD reader in my laptop that I was hoping to use.