Lost my camera on a night out - need recommendations for a replacement.

[Jacko371]

I've been in Cyprus for the past week & on day 4 I lost my camera when I was on a night out!

The camera I lost was a Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-T7 (picture (http://www.thedvdforums.com/jump2.php?url=http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009J575K/thedvdforums-21)) which is very slim with a large lcd display. What I didn't like about it was that as the top and bottom were curved & not flat & when other people were taking photos they tended to rock the camera as they pressed the shutter button & the picture comes out blurry.

Before that I had a Canon Ixus 40 which took amazing pictures but was slightly too thick (especially when in a case) to take out on a night out.

So I'm sort of after a camera that is as thin as the Sony with a LCD screen as big but takes pictures as well the Canon. I mainly take pictures on a night out so a good flash/good night shots would help.

Cheers

[rwniel]

As you've discovered, there are trade-offs between balancing the physical size of the camera and image quality (which is a factor of lens size/quality, sensor 'density' and how the image is processed). Not surprisingly, there are also limits with where and how powerful things like the flash are - the distance from the lens affects aspects like red-eye.

Best image quality by far in a compact camera in low light is the Fuji f31fd but of course it's not as compact as the Sony. The larger form factor does enable you to have a battery that seems to go on forever. A reasonable balance might be a Canon IXUS 800 IS; although there are later models with more megapixels they don't seem to be as good so don't assume more means better. Perhaps also look at the Ricoh R6 (or R4 if you can still find one - try to avoid the R5).

The Sony T100 might also be an option, as I was reasonably impressed with the 'BIONZ' image processing at high ISO settings with maintaining detail. It does seem to have a bit of a tendency to oversharpen the photos though, but that may not matter so much if you only plan to print at smaller sizes and do minimal other processing on them. It has a nice big 3" LCD display which unfortunately does hit the battery life a bit.

You can find print samples from all these models on the Pbase camera database (http://www.pbase.com/cameras).

Robert