Small starter camera that would be better than a smartphone? Casual Photography..

Grimezy

Prolific Poster
Hi guys,

Never really been much into photography as I've never seen myself as an artsy farty creative kind of person... However, I have a few events coming up in the near future where I would like to capture some photos. In the past, I've tried to scrape by with my 8MP Samsung Galaxy S2 phone camera which has been fine but if I'm staying away and need to conserve my battery, using it as a camera doesn't work brilliantly. Plus as soon as I upload it to my PC the images are a bit square-ish and the detail distorts at fullscreen even though I have it set to a 3264x2448 resolution displaying on a 1920x1080 screen... (perhaps I'm doing something stupidly wrong).

So what I'm looking for is something basic but something decent. I'd like them to stay a decent quality when uploading onto a pc so I just wanted an idea of what to look out for and what to avoid (I'm aware I shouldn't be tricked into the "Wow! More megapixels! Must be more awesome!" thing). Plus it ideally needs to majorly destroy my smartphone's camera to make it feel worthwhile. I love the looks of the Nikon 1's and stuff but from what I've seen they're ridiculously expensive. The Panasonic Lumix range also seems to stick out on the amazon best sellers page..

What do you guys think? Any suggestions or tips would be great. I don't really have a budget as such, as those who have known me for a while will know, I would prefer to spend a few extra pennies for something worthwhile than buying cheap and regretting it later. Initially I think I would be comfortable with £100-£150 though as I don't know how much I'll be using it I probably wouldn't want to go too crazy.

To give you an idea of the circumstances I will be using it in, I regularly go to car shows (believe it or not the RS4 in my picture isn't mine!) and it'll just be for general holidays and gatherings :)

Thanks in advance!

Edit: Best Seller on amazon is the Canon Powershot SX240: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Canon-Power...=sr_1_1?s=photo&ie=UTF8&qid=1377705498&sr=1-1

Any thoughts?
 
Last edited:

Androcles

Rising Star
Argos have some fairly nice Nikon bridge cameras in your price range at the moemnt, and Tesco have some fujifilm bridge cameras in your price range too, so you should be able to get something fairly decent.
 
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