Looking for a camera, all advice very much appreciated

[indieboy]

Hi guys,

I'm looking for a camera. No duh? Well, my needs are kind of weird and I am not expecting the camera to meet all the criteria, but as many of them as possible would be great:

• Some experimental work for me as an amateur photographer and photoshoper
• night time stuff (i.e music concerts)
• easy enough to use for my family
• video functinality would be awesome
• under 300 euro (500 dollars)
• not be some chunky massive camera
• look slightly unique

Alot of criteria eh? Well any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Photo-John]

If you have $500 dollars to spend, I don't think budget is an issue. Size sounds like the biggest problem. My first recommendation, since you want to do concert photography, would be a superzoom like the Olympus SP570 UZ or the Canon Powershot S5 IS (similar cameras are also availabe from Nikon, Sony & Panasonic). I'm not sure how big a "chunky massive camera" is to you. Those cameras won't fit in your pocket. But they offer a lot of lens and performance in a relatively small package compared to a digital SLR. A very interesting and powerful alternative is the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5. It doesn't have a lens that protrudes like current superzooms. But it does have a 10x, image stabilizaed optical zoom lens. We haven't had that camera for review yet, but we did review the TZ3 last spring, if you want to learn more about it:

Panasonic Lumix TZ3 Pro Review

The more I think about it, the more I think the TZ5 might be a good fit for you.

Let me know what you think about the TZ5 and tell us if you have more questions. I ignored unique look requirement because that would probably require performance compromises - that and I didn't really have any ideas. Samsung does have a compact camera with a big zoom. But I have been very unimpressed with Samsung compact digital camera image quality.

[indieboy]

I actually ended up buying that before you had posted that comment. So thank you for assuring me that the TZ5 was a good choice.

Cheers