Best Bets in Cameras, Under $300

Dear camera companies of the world:

Happy holidays from the camera labs of The New York Times (that is, my attic)!

It’s time once again for the wintertime stunt I’ve been conducting since 2001: a research project I like to call, “How much digital camera can $300 buy you?”

The main thing we care about is image quality, not bells and whistles. We want your best camera with a street price under $300. And may the best cam win!

Source: usa.cannon.com Canon Powershot SD880 IS

With only one exception, the cameras submitted for this roundup cost around $250 or less. Maybe it’s the economy, maybe it’s some quirk of consumer psychology — but there’s no such thing as a $300 camera anymore.

Quite a bit has changed in the camera landscape since this survey began in 2001 — and even since last year. All of these cameras now have optical image stabilizers. That is, their sensors actually jiggle, about 4,000 times a second, to counteract the little jitters of your hand — an effective way to reduce blurry shots when you’re zoomed in or in low light.

All now offer face recognition, too. It sounds like a bell, or maybe a whistle, but is, in fact, fantastically useful. When you frame up the shot, the camera draws rectangles around any faces that it spots and calculates its focus and exposure on these. No longer will you get a photo where your two buddies are out of focus, but the background behind them is nice and sharp. In principle, you won’t get bleached-out faces from the flash, either; on most cameras, the flash throttles back its power when it sees faces in the scene.

Some cameras (Casio, Sony, Olympus, Nikon) even offer a gimmick called Smile Shutter, which waits to take the photo until your subject is smiling. In my tests, it only sort of worked; your model has to be practically smiling her head off.

Wide-angle lenses are fast becoming common, too. The Sony, Panasonic, Casio, Samsung and Canon cameras can capture a much broader slice of your landscape than the others, giving a panoramic effect to your photos.

Several cameras claim to capture high-definition video, but don’t be fooled. That term reflects only the dimensions of the movies, not the quality — which, compared with what you see on HDTV channels, is terrible. It’s the video equivalent of bragging about how many megapixels your camera has — these days, an essentially meaningless statistic. (If you care, most of these cameras have 10 megapixels.)

Unfortunately, almost all of these cameras do terribly in low light. You inevitably wind up with blur, grain or both — unless you use the flash, which produces a totally different kind of photo. (Some of the manufacturers claim, rather ridiculously, that their cameras have light sensitivity up to ISO 3200 or even 6400. But the results are blotchy messes that barely qualify as Seurat paintings, let alone photographs.)

Shutter lag remains a problem, too; the delay between the time you press the shutter button and the time the shot is taken is still too long. Only two cameras — Kodak and Sony — still have an eyepiece (optical) viewfinder, which can be helpful in bright sunshine or the dark. The others require that you frame your shots using the screen.

That said, there are some keepers here. Herewith, in alphabetical order, Pogue’s Camera Lab notes for the nine contenders of 2008:

CANON POWERSHOT SD880 IS ($252). This camera has a 4X zoom, wide-angle lens. Customizable top button; it can be a Movie button so you don’t have to change modes for video. Huge, bright three-inch screen, but too bad there’s no optical viewfinder.

Gorgeous and solid. Controls are beautifully thought-out. New processor chip makes this camera very fast. Not many gimcracks, but wow, those photos — in any kind of light, they have a presence, detail and vibrancy that puts the other cameras to shame.

Doggone that Canon. It wins this contest every single year. C’mon, people — where’s the suspense?

CASIO EXILIM EX-Z300 ($270). The most expensive camera here — but why? Clever ideas that only sort of work: it can wait to take a shot when you’re smiling, when there’s no blur, or when your face enters the frame (instead of using the self-timer). Makeup Mode does a creepy but effective job of making skin look airbrushed.

But the photos and movies are just average. (Oh — and Casio? Putting all 21 languages into a single 100-page manual might have saved you a few pennies. But it takes more than five pages to explain a complex camera.)

FUJIFILM FINEPIX F60FD ($220). A fast, solid, clearly designed camera. Good exposures, nice work in low light — no doubt because it has the biggest sensor of the contest (0.625 inches diagonally, rather than the usual 0.4). Features you can really use, like one that snaps both a flash and a no-flash picture simultaneously. Manual controls, too. Picture quality very good. Question: Why isn’t Fujifilm a better-known player

CONTINUED : Top three contenders

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