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Not sure whether this question has bee nasked before, but can someone suggest which is the best "bang for buck" camera in the point & shoot models?

The budget I am looking around is around $400 AUS

Cheers!

IMHO, if you are after manual adjustability, Canon A-series cameras are a good bet. As an example, the 5MP A95 with its swivel LCD monitor, 3X zoom, CF & AA compatibility is currently being cleared out at around $400. The newer, smaller A520 is around that price point too, IIRC.

If you are looking for something that's more automated, the Panasonic DMC-LZ1 has 4MP, 6X optical zoom *and* image stabilisation and costs around $400. It uses SD, but also takes AA batteries.

--Chuan

Thanks.

Has anyone had first hand experience on Canon PowerShotSD20; Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ2 and nikon Coolpix 5900.

All in similar ranges with almost similar features.

Cheers!

My wife has the coolpix 7900, she seems to like it very much.

She didn't really care too much about raw files or manual overides of aperature and shutter speeds.

Just point and shoot and all is happy for her.

I had a similar dilema - was wanting an entry level P&S cam that takes AA and hopefully CF media. In the end it came down to Canon A510/520 versus Panasonic LZ-1/LZ-2 (both took SD cards - the A95 which took CFs were too expensive for what it was IMHO). The Pana won out, due to optical image stabilisation (and 6x zoom instead of 4x on the A510/520). Got a Canon IXUS that takes CF, I found the newer A series models still suffer from poor lens quality (soft corners, prone to chromatic abberation - they could be plastic and not proper glass lens).

The LZ-1 I ended up with have a heavily processed/noise removed watercolour look to them at high ISO (Mega OIS allows slower shutter speeds and ultimately lower ISO) which I dislike, but at base ISO images are great and the camera behaves as expected. I find Canons have the smeared/heavily noise removed look no matter what ISO it's set to.