Two questions

[Goober McTuber]

Tardowen,

You've been blocked from viewing that thread due to your constant disrespect of Luther. BTW, $175 will buy a decent length of rope and a step-stool. I think you know where I'm going with this.

[Mister Bushice]

$175 will buy you a very nice piece of shit camera at target with ZERO accessories, except what came in the box.

If you're not shopping above $300, you will get a basic digital camera that will take excellent lousy pics, unless you don't know better, then they will be awesome lousy pics.

IMO If you want point and shoot excellence and durability, buy a Canon model. The prices go up as you add features, but they have some good stuff in the 300 range, and they last. I bought a $399 canon sure shot with a built in short range telephoto lens and I took around 25,000 pics with it over a 3 year span before it crapped out. It took a heap of abuse in that time. I bought another same model canon for $379 because of that, although they had a $329 with a smaller screen

ALWAYS get the ext warranty. you WILL drop it, or fuck it up. Worth the $75 bucks to get it fixed free.

I'm sure there are some cameras in your $175 price range, but I wouldn't even look at them. I wouldn't want to be throwing it out in a year/ replacing it in two years for another $175.

Goobs was way more on the right track than I am.

BTW This board was pruned when they upgraded it. Wrinkled old lady out front should have told you.

[Louis Cyphre]

I agree with Bushice, go with a Canon model. We got my wife a Canon A550 6.0 mega-pixel because she doesn't like lugging around our dSLR. The A550 takes decent pics for a "point and shoot" and can be bought for under $150. The major drawback of the camera is the delay of 2 seconds between snapping pics. If Target sell it, the camera and a 1 meg SD card should use up a good chunk of that gift card of yours.

[PSUFAN]

When we upgraded the board software, we dealt search a critical blow (actually foreseen by the phpBB folks). There is a fix...I'll get to it when I get a few minutes.

[ElTaco]

I disagree. You can buy a $100 digital camera with 3mp or higher and if you know what the hell you are doing, you can get a very nice picture. Any basic photography site will tell you that. The problem is most people don't know how to frame a shot or anything beyond the 'auto' settings so they couldn't take a nice picture to save their lives, even if they had a $10k camera. I would agree that you will probably need a little more money, if for no other reason then a basic digital 5 or 6mp point and click camera will run you between $150-$300 and then you still need to buy a camera bag and an SD card for it. I would say honestly, you should be aiming for $300 to get everything just to start shooting.

[Mister Bushice]

kind of what I meant. you will want an extra SD card, they usually only supply a 32mb one, a case is good to store and protect, and either an extra rechargable lithium batt, or a good supply of rechrgbl batteries. the image screen will eat batt time, and all those things add up.

Although I didn't realize canon made low end products worth the price, though I don't camera shop at tarjay, the cheaper models usually have such small screens.

[Louis Cyphre]

Correction: My wife has the Canon PowerShot A560 and it's a 7.1 MP camera. Target sells it for $150.

[BSmack]

For under 175 you can easily get a small 5-7 megapixel camera with image stabilization and a 3x zoom. Add another 50-75 (depending on exactly how much you lay out for the camera) for a case and a 2GB memory card.

Don't bother with the SLR style cameras until you're sure you really need one. Even if you do get an SLR at a later date, a small handheld camera comes in handy for more than a few occasions when you don't want to be lugging around a big bulky camera.