My daughter is off backpacking in Thailand next week followed by a few months in S. America and needs a camera.

Criteria is :-

Must be simple to use – repeat must be simple to use
Reasonable quality pics
Decent memory (or easily upgradable memory card)
Reasonably priced ie. as much under £100 as possible – I'm paying 😉

Any ideas ? She goes next week so need it asap.

I like cannon ixus ones, but sony also seem good although the colours look a bit too vivid in daylight (guess this is an automatic thing, looked fine indoors).

Find out what a friend has, are they happy with it, get that. They will all be much the same.

I bought a cannon powershot A570, biggest pile of crap ever made, ate AA batteries in about 30 seconds, and picture quality was awfull. If it wasnt for the cashback deal I would have assumed it was a face from china or somewhere.

There are so many out there to choose from, I have been using a Finepix 550 for the last 4 years and have taken some great pictures,and its been 100% reliable, using it in some very hostile conditions, also use Energizer rechargeable 2450mah batterys, I just did a trip to the USA for just over 2 weeks, used the camera every day, took 300 plus pictures and video, never changed the battery in the camera, I took 2 more sets with me but never used them.

Only thing I would say is a must, make sure you have a view finder aswell as the screen, using the screen in bright sun can be a pain to see, but with a view finder this is not a problem.

Canon Ixus or Panasonic Lumix – whatever fits in your budget (or stop being stingy and spend a little bit more 😉 )

what grum said

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Canon-Digital-IXUS-95-Camera/dp/B001T9NH5G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1277400045&sr=8-1

Look around the likes of Curry's, they often have end of line cameras or display models going cheaper, I've seen Lumix and Nikon Coolpix cameras going for less than £100 in my local town centre shop. You can pick up Fuji Finepix for around
£70 or so, and most use SD or SDHC cards, which you can get cheap online. I got three 4Gb unbranded Toshiba made cards from 7Dayshop for £19, and I've seen 16Gb cards now going for less than £20. Don't buy them from the high street; I recently saw 4Gb cards in Morrisons for £26!

Canon Sureshot 210IS.

Also get 30 quid cashback.

Loving the Lumix

Lumix are great, my TZ3's taken thousands of photos. Redthunder has posted up some fantastic shots taken with his Sureshot. Difficult to go badly wrong with a modern digital camera. One point worth making, some cameras use proprietary batteries, so it would be worth making sure the camera will use good old AA or AAA's that can be obtained anywhere, as well as sticking with SD cards. Some like Sony use their own Memory Stick cards, and Olympus use or used to use XD cards, which only Minolta ever took on. I think most use SD/SDHC cards now, which are cheap and cheerful.

Thanks

I can recommend Canon IXUS.

Edit – just seen the link above!

While the Ixus range are lovely little cameras, I have a Casio Exlim, and the battery life is infinitely better than the wife's Ixus.

These are both about 5 years old, and have probably improved now, but worth considering.

Cheers, Rich

I have an Ixus and just set it to under-expose just a tad all the time.

You can always add light to a pic, but not detail, if it's burned out so there are fewer missed shots.

Nice handy little camera

olympus mju are waterproof and dustproof, so take a bit of abuse, good idea for being thrown in a baclpack when travelling.

I have an old Ixus myself and it's a good robust little camera and perfect for taking out on the bike.

I'm really tempted by the Sony W310 which PC World have a good deal on at the moment. £99 for a bundle incl. case and 4GB memory which looks hard to beat. Anyone got experience of it.

HERE

My old fuji F50 was ace – took some really great shots, however it had a propritary batter and used XD cards…

Lokk for something thats capable of nice wide angles, has low f number (fast glass) and some element of manual control. Then try and find it cheaper…