I'm thinking about buying a new digital camera and would like to solicit recommendations. My current one stopped working.

 

Other than being able to spot interesting things and frame a scene, I know little about photography. My old camera was a point-and-shoot model that cost $100.

The main use will be to take technical photos at construction sites, mostly outdoors. My old one fit in a little bag that I attached to my belt and carried with me all the time. I liked the fact that it was small. Also, as it has been mentioned on this site before, a small camera attracts less attention, which in turn allows more access, because people tend to get excited when they see big cameras. 

I tried a little astrophotography once. I purchased a through-the-eyepiece camera mount for my telescope, but it was so flimsy that it took too much time to get the camera focused and keep it from moving. Although the photos turned out okay, I would much prefer a way to attach the camera directly to the telescope. (They make special astrophotography cameras, but I would rather not buy two cameras.)

Finally, I post photos to UO, and would like to post more. (Hint: incentive to help me out!)

 

I would prefer to spend less than $500. Would consider a used one, too.

 

Anyone have any ideas to share?

 

 

I haven't shopped these in a while, so I'm not fully up to date on what's available. I've been primarily a Nikon user for more than thirty years, but in compact digital cameras I've been more impressed with Canon's offerings. The Powershot series cameras seem to offer a lot of features and high image quality for their class.

 

If you may want to print from your images, Camera RAW storage mode is a good feature to have; it captures a broad range of exposure data that provides a great deal of flexibility when working in Photoshop or similar software. It helps to recover shadow and highlight detail, correct color balance, and generally produce a better print. The advantages aren't wasted when making JPG images for on-screen display, either.

 

I'm fortunate to live near a good locally-owned independent camera shop where the employees know their gear and always are willing to take time to explain features and help customers figure out what best suits their needs. If you have access to a place like that I recommend going there, even if you spend a few dollars more than you would at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or an on-line vendor. You might take along your SD card on the chance that they'd let you snap a few photos with their cameras and then take the card home to peruse and compare the images at your leisure.

If you're looking for one just for random moments and construction scenes I would say any point and shoot should do the trick. I preferably go for Canons just because I'm more use to the settings and software, plus they're by far the best quality I've seen. A good point at shoot would be any of the canon powershots.

I agree with the others, I really liked my last Cannon powershot.  My wife picked our new camera, a Sony cybershot.  Sony's use of proprietary memory cards really rubs me the wrong way.  I also wanted a card capable of Geo-tagging but I don't know if I can buy one for a Sony.

On SLR stuff, I always went Nikon. Don't know much about point and shoots, except that i have heard many good things about Lumix (Panasonic).

 

I just got an email from Nikon about refurbished equipment for sale. Here's a link:

 

http://support.nikonusa.com/cgi-bin/nikonusa.cfg/php/enduser/doc_view.php?1=AvUC~wrKBv8ST9K5Gr4e~yL~Jvsq~wH~9bdMCTr~