Seriously, I’d (almost) rather be doing my Finance homework than shopping for a new digital camera.
It shouldn’t be that hard. I have a very nice SLR camera I use for what little high-end photography I do, so the digicam is just for day to day snapshots. I don’t have a long list of “must have” features. I have a reasonable budget. There’s a ton of cameras out there to choose from.
But that’s the problem. Even narrowing down the options to just two or three manufacturers, I still have dozens of cameras to choose from. And narrowing it down beyond that gets really tough. Every camera has a huge list of features, all with plusses and minuses. Every camera has both positive and negative reviews. But how to decide? Should I really care that a cover ‘seems flimsy’ or that a few people complain about blurry photos? How do I know if these people are being too nit-picky or pointing out real issues?
And the online guides are not all that helpful. Take Digital Photography Review, which several people pointed me to for guidance. There’s a very long list of features you can use to search their listings, but if you don’t narrow your choices down enough, the site only gives you the first 10 options back as a result. You don’t know if that’s the first 10 of 12 or 120, so you don’t know if those 10 cameras are a representative sample or not. And a lot of those choices, I either don’t know or don’t care about the option in question. What the heck is ‘white balance override’, and why should I care about uncompressed format types? Beats me. In short, if I cared more about high-end digital photography, it would probably be very useful, but for a hobbyist like me it was too much.
CNET’s search was more useful for my needs, but still tended to produce too many results for me to effectively deal with. A list of 125 possibilities is just too much for me to deal with. I don’t want to have to spend hours on this. I just want a list of 12 or so good options so I can pick the one that I like best.
Scott’s trying to be helpful and searched out two options for me to look at, one Sony, one Canon. It’s a help, but I’m still feeling paralyzed by all the choices I have. As much as I want a better digital camera, it’s actively stressing me out trying to pick one. I suppose I could go to the nearest store that sells digital cameras and simply buy one rather than over-analyzing the situaiton, and I might end up doing just that if I can’t get my head around all the information.
It shouldn’t be this hard.
Or am I making it too hard?