I need digital camera advice/recommendations

Satsuki

Before I go to Japan I'm getting a digital camera. Now I just need to figure out what kind.

I'm looking for a basic digital camera that will be good for taking lots of pics but without all the bells and whistles. I'm no artistic photographer, although sometimes I like to try and take good shots of gardens. Something with good battery life, nice size (doesn't have to be tiny like some of them), 4 Megapixels, and in a reasonable price range (around 200, preferably no more).

Right now the camera I've got my eye on is the Nikon Coolpix 4600. It's got everything I'm looking for, but apparently it has a problem with blurry pictures once you turn the flash off. You'd need a tripod to correct it.

So is anybody here a Nikon user and can inform me more about this or have any other model recommendations for me?

Bounty1Berry

Okay, I don't use that camera (I have a Rollei D330), but you might wanna check if the cameras you're considering can do an "evaluation" of the scene before you take the picture.

On mine, you hold the button down partway, it does all the focusing and exposure calculation, then notes what exposure settings it will use. If you want those settings, you can then press it all the way down and take the shot. This has saved me boatloads of crappy, shaken pictures when the camera warns you it will expose at 1/8 or 1/15 second (anything slower than 1/60 or possibly 1/30 is likely to show shake and blur)

e1n

canon A510 is real good for 200 price range. it's only 3.2 megapixel, but it's got 4x OPTICAL zoom. plus it's got a nice manual setting function so that you can adjust shutter speed and aperture to get best result in shitty lighting. this picture i took of my parents were taken in round table pizza with really shitty lighting. NO FLASH USED. i dislike using flash, since they tend to make the pictures look unnatural.

also for close objects, this camera can focus real close when switched into manual focus mode:

price is $199 everywhere, so if you can find cheaper than that, it's considered cheap. i got mine at frys last week when they had that on sale for $169.

ooshi78

i use a minolta dimage xt. it's the smallest camera with a optical zoom (or at least at the time i bought it). i think it was around $300 so the price should be down. 3.2MP. if you're gonna get a camera with a zoom, make sure it's optical as digital zoom means nothing. if you're not going to do action shots, start up time and response times don't matter much. good hunting.

ooshi78