Want to get into digital photography, but find your funds lacking? We assess the best budget point-and-shoot cameras to sort the deals from the duds.
The problem with making predictions in the IT consumer space is that you can relatively quickly be proven wrong. Take, for example, the statement in this commentary that budget digital cameras are, to a man, awful. That was true at the time, but, as we discovered testing eight different digital cameras in the sub-AU$500 space, it's not necessarily true any more.
As digital cameras have become more mainstream, and as sales have picked up, it's become easier than ever to get into digital photography. Easy, however, doesn't automatically mean that it's simple to make the right investment; just because a digital camera looks like a good investment doesn't mean that it will be.
Having said that, there are still a number of very solid reasons to get into digital photography at the cheaper end of the market. If you're only an average photographer at the best of times, the shoot and delete nature of digital photography is not only very handy, it's also something of a money saver. While you won't get the kind of results a high-end photographer might insist upon, most budget digital cameras are quite well suited to normal everyday consumer tasks, especially if you don't need every last shot printed.
Entering into digital photography also gives you entry into the world of digitally altering photographs, either for the purposes of enhancement or to change photographic subject matter altogether.
All of the digital cameras we've reviewed here came in with one specific proviso; they had to be ready to go, out of the box, for less than AU$500. We've reviewed seven cameras ranging in price from AU$199 to AU$449 from a variety of vendors, although there are still other options open to you.
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I have just seen an advertisement for the CX4230 in a pop up when I went to the Korean Herald newspaper at http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/index.asp . It was selling there for 185000 Won which equals AU$204, half what we would pay for it. I wonder why we can't get it at that price here?