Digital camera

[Hoosier724]

I've been shopping for a digital camera for a while and saw today that Walmart will have a Kodak CX4300 tomorrow for $154. Looked like a good price for a camera...any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks

[bill1971]

Looks like a pretty good deal, Hoosier:
Particularly for a 3.3 megapixel camera. Looks like it lacks an
optical zoom, just 2x digital zoom; 16MB internal memory, but has
a MMC/SD slot to accommodate those types of memory cards, which have really become affordable over the last couple of years.

Unless you need/want a camera w/ more features, this should be
a great camera to start out with. 3.3 mp for $154 is a very
tempting deal. This coming from a casual user of my 1 mp HP.
Hope this helps.

- Bill

[dunbar]

I use a Fuji FinePix 2600z, at 2.1 mp I paid ~$270 for it last spring, I like it well enough, but it has its own problems.

Issues you may want to consider:
ISO equivalent speed rating. ISO 100 is slow film, my Fuji is ISO 100 rated and just like slow film cameras I have used, it is really easy to get blurry pix. I urge you research this rating for any camera, try a 100, then try a 200 and compare ease of blurring.
Low light capability: cameras needing large amounts of light will force flash to be used more often. No ideas there.
Quantity of batteries in the camera: My Fuji uses 2 AA NiMH: I can't fill a 32 meg card if I use flash all the time. Cameras that need 4 batteries seem to please their owners more than owners of 2 AA cameras.
Lens materials: A Hewlett Packard I once owned (318s) was horribly blurred, due to defective lenses. Plastic camera lenses suffer this more often than necessary.
Connectivity: USB or other hardwire interface from camera to PC would be a big plus. Don't get a camera if it uses those junk floppy disk smart card readers.
Graininess of the pictures: the HP I mentioned above also lost big points when an overcast day produced grainy shots of a plain white background.
File type used for storing pictures: Early Sony cameras used floppies to store uncompressed bitmap files. 3 or 4 files per floppy. Current cameras use jpeg format files, my camera holds about 40 jpeg shots on a 32 meg card, in its highest quality mode.

Big plus getting a 3 mp for under $200, and from a known camera manufacturer at that!