Help me choose...?

[snow17white]

Hello,
I am having so much trouble choosing a digital camera.

I'm after something above 8mp, with a wide angle lens and possibly manual controls (although i know i'm asking a bit much to have it all) and something that works well in low light.

I first bought a Ricoh R7 - although returned it when i noticed the screen was defective (apart from that it would have been great!) - the images were a little pixelated and jagged (over sharp?).

So i returned the Ricoh R7 for a Nikon P5100 - which takes beautiful images, but is kind of slow and the zoom is useless, also no wide angle.

I am now looking at a Lumix - possibly the TZ11 (or TZ4 as it is also known) or maybe the TZ3 or something with manual settings.

This is the price range i am looking in.

Does anyone have any advice they could give me??? Going on a holiday in a week and am getting sick of thinking about it.

Any ideas???

[byjamesderuvoDHQ]

I wouldn't jump too quickly onto the "more MP is better bandwagon." That's alot like saying if I take this much medicine then more will make me feel much better! Obviously, it doesn't and may even be worse for you. The same hold true with point and shoot camerass above 6mp, according to this article.

According to Image Engineering[/url] – a company that does testing of digital cameras for photo magazines in Germany – the quality of digital pictures has steadily decreased since the state of the art was six megapixels back in 2004. And because they don’t have a “dog in this hunt,” they put forth a compelling argument for buying new digital cameras with less mega pixels and not more.

The argument is essentially this: CCD chips on point and shoot cameras a smaller and as such, fitting in more pixels causes them to lose light sensivity. Sure, there’s more data on the chip, but the chip can’t absorb the light data and what it ends up with is a picture that has more noise than image quality. In addition, the more megapixels a camera has, the larger the lens it needs to provide the clarity it deserves and prevent diffraction due to a loss of detail with smaller apertures. But since we’re talking portable point and shoots here, those large lenses simply aren’t being made.

Finally, with larger mega pixels comes longer saving time due to their requires huge storage capacity, or more compression if not storing images in RAW format. The result is a noisier image and a dissatisfied camera user who thirsts for high quality and speed but fell into the trap of "more must mean better."

In the end, relying on a smaller MP that can balance all these needs may indeed be a better answer.