"Possibly" busting the budget?
I've tried to keep the advice generic and respecting the budget. A quick trawl for the EOS through Kelkoo gives the best price of £510 quid and that is just for the body!
Adding a the most commonly offered lens to the equation I find the best deal coming out at £544 GBP but that includes a £100 cashback deal.
Continuing to assume the budget is important I've had a look at an online retailer I've had good service from and looked at an area I particularly favour - factory refurbished cameras. Using five megapixels as a baseline we find this:
Refurbished Olympus C50Z
Combining first rate photo technology with a compact metal body. Incorporating a five megapixel CCD, bright (f2.8) 3x zoom lens and precision metering systems. More ambitious photographers will appreciate the creative freedom enabled by the manually-adjustable features, such as aperture, shutter and white balance. Finally, this model uses the new digital image storage standard xD-Picture Card. _
Price:__£169.00Including VAT at 17.5%
or how about
:
Refurbished Sony P10
Sony’s Cyber-shot DSC-P10 digital still camera combines excellent image quality with compact design, delivering 5.0 megapixel resolution (effective) with a 3x optical/ 4x digital zoom lens and intelligent features.
These features inlude 3-Area Multi-Point AF (Auto-Focus) and Continuous AF for sharply-focused shots even in low-light or active conditions. 16-Frame Multi-Burst function captures 16 320x240 frames with 3 selectable intervals for convenient motion analysis. You can also take MPEG movies and record voice memos for your photos. The DSC-P10 also features a lightning-fast USB 2.0 interface for high-speed transfer. The DSC-P10 is Memory Stick Pro compatible so you can now get up to 1GB of optional storage.
Price:__£225.00Including VAT at 17.5%
So, hand on heart we're looking at refurbs to get into decent quality 5MP compacts. I chose the first as it only suffers a quarter second shutter lag and the second to show the good and bad side of burst settings on compacts along with the peril of a very expensive memory format.
So - top tips. Look at guaranteed refurbs. Look at cameras from outside the five big names as they occupy some interesting niches.
As to SLR's there's always eBay if you're feeling lucky
or, or, umm you'll get a great basic SLR set up if you, gasp(!!) look at traditional film
Regards again,
Rob Lloyd