OT: Digital Camera, Looking for the most bang for the buck Options

[ptravnic]

I'd like it to be able to capture short video as well - nothing crazy. I've been using a 2mega pixel HP PhotoSmart for a few years but it's clunky and doesn't do video...It's dated and is enough to get by but who wants to just get by?

What is the best size megapixel camera for the buck?

Ease of use?

Are video's easily uploadable/downloadable/edited?


I'm wondering if maybe I should get a camera for photo's and a digital recording device for video's... Thoughts, epinions?

-pt

[jhadler]

We have a Panasonic FX9 and like it a lot. 5 Mp, and very quick shutter response time. Very nice video quality, and in .mov format too. Nice for a Mac fellow like myself.

Very small, roughly cell phone sized. A very large, and bright display in the back. SD card memory, can hold lots of stills and/or video. feature rich, and an easy to navigate menu system.

Has built in mechanical image stabilization, which I like better than the digital stabilization stuff. And it seems to work really well so far.

So far the only drawback I've found is that the CCD suffers some saturation on one edge when shooting video in bright daylight. No problem at all with stills though. Not a big deal, and some wouldn't even notice or care.

We used to have a Kodak 2MP camera, and it just plain sucked compared to the Panasonic. The video quality is so good that we tend to use the camera to shoot video clips of our daughter instead of the bigger digital camcorder we have. The camcorder takes time to get going, the camera can go from pocket to shooting video in very little time. Has pretty good audio too...

-Josh2

edit - it's a Panasonic, I had mistakenly written Pentax...