Help Choosing

[Jilly16]

I need to buy a new camera before I go to Disney in October. I already have a pocket sized camera but I was thinking along the lines of a full featured camera with at least a 12x Optical zoom. Any suggestions?

[Kelly Grannell]

For 12x zoom I can only recommend Canon S3 IS.

for comparison Canon S3 IS vs Sony H5 click the following link:
http://landakphotography.blogspot.com/2006/07/sony-dsc-h5-pros-and-cons-vs-canon-s3.html

and decide for yourself.

[Jilly16]

I really like what I see with the canon s3 IS. Can you give me any feedback or pictures on it?

[Kelly Grannell]

Quite unfortunately I delete all test pictures because if I don't do so, I'll end up with gigabytes of pictures of every camera I have tested (on average I test 2 cameras per week)

However, S3 and S2 are not much different. Up to ISO 400 the picture quality are about the same (S3 ISO 400 is a tad cleaner) and the ISO 800 is useable just for 4x6 print, very noisy, unless you use a free software such as Imagenomic Noiseware to clean the noise (which for some reason the default setting is very effective for Canon images).

Therefore, you can see the result of S3 through the results of S2. They are all over the place on this board. One of the frequent poster who uses the S2 exclusively is makinorlando. Just do a search on her and you'll find tons of pictures by her.