Best settings for point and shoot

[myCharlie]

We've purchased the Konica Minolta Dimage A200 camera about a year or two ago. I'm not an expert on photography but since I'm the IT in this department I'm stock with showing my colleagues how to point and shoot.

First of, I've recieved complaints that this camera is no good compare to the $90 or so camera from Wal-mart. Those cameras can do point and shoot without having to fiddle with the shutter speed, flash, aperture and so on. How do I answer these kinds of questions? Besides the fact that this camera can shoot in RAW data, what's the advantages of this camera compare to any cheap camera like less than $200?

Second, what is the best mode or settings for me to tell my collegues to set this camera in? Most of the times they will not have the time to adjust anything on the camera like shutter speed, white balance and so on. All they wanted to do is take out the camera, point, and shoot. The most complaints I've got is that the picture they took with this camea turned out to be blurry or fuzzy. If I can show them how to eliminate this problem without fooling around with F-stop, flash, shutter speed, and aperture everytime they try to take a picture, I think they'll be happy. The problem is they don't want to spend the extra 2 or 3 minutes to adjust their camera and they are also a group of non-technical folks.

I hope someone can help me help them.

Thanks so much!

[polarbeardiggers]

i can only comment by saying perhaps they must turn off the manual feature and use the auto features,but the camera your using is not a point and shoot,therefore you have no choice but to fiddle with the lens to get pictures in focus,but keeping in mind that the aperature must be set right as well and the iso plays a factor as does the white balance- you just can't give a person a dslr camera and expect them to take great in focus shots,i have a prosumer point and shot,yes i have auto,but 95 % of my shooting is done with manual mode,how else is a person going to learn,perhaps in a few years after mastering my settings it will be a breeze to jump into a great dslr camera, i could give you settings but that means nothing because light changes every ten minutes in the same location, perhaps using the live histogram would be a good start and resetting the camera so it gets a average 0.0 exposure reading from the histogram.

[myCharlie]

Thanks for your suggestions. I have not talked to my co-workers but I suspect that they never use the built-in flash nor an external flash that we purchased with the set. After a weekend of runing some test shoots, with the flash on, the picture are greatly improved especially the bluriness. I will give some of the settings your suggest a test run too. Thanks again.