Best Outdoor Camera??

[Quattro15]

I am looking for a camera to take on numerous hiking trips so it needs to be able to handle some outdoor adventures.

I want it to be able to take nice landscapes scenes and I take a lot of pics from mountaintops, but would also like to be able to take pics in macro.

I'm sort of divided on the zoom....the more the better, but i want it to be able to be accessed easy while hiking, so it needs to be kinda small so i can keep it somewhere that i can get to it fast.

I'd like at least 5 megapixels, but nothing crazy, and some manual control would be nice as i take pictures where water in involved and like to leave the shutter open to get those sweeping pictures of the water.

I'd like to make big prints with the camera also, but not necessarily poster sized.

I was kind of looking at the minolta dimage z6, the pentax optio wpi (due to it being waterproof), the Fujifilm Finepix F10, the Panasonic one with 10x zoom, don't quite remember the name of that one though. Anyhow, any help would be appreciated, I just don't want to buy a camera and feel that it is lacking in much of anything. Thanks

[Quattro15]

The panasonic cameras i was looking at were the FZ5 and the FZ20.

[David Metsky]

I carry a SD300 on my hiking/skiing/adventures. My other camera is an Oly C-720 and after a while I found it too bulky for convienent use, especially with skiing. For this reason alone I would eliminate the ultrazooms, while it's not a huge amount larger, in the field it's a pain to carry it on your sternum strap. Even on a hip belt I find the larger models to get in the way.

So, if you go with an ultra compact I have had good luck with my SD300, you can also look at the SD450 and SD550. I think the FZ5 would be a good option, and I'd also look at the weatherproof Olympus 500.

Landscapes are easy, all the cameras do well there. The Canons don't have manual controls, but you can do some stuff to get the long exposures you want.

-dave-

[coldrain]

The canon powershot s60/70 has a wide angle lens, equivalent to 28 mm. They also have a nice panorama mode that guides you to make more pictures that you later can stitch together with a number of software packages, including canons photostich that comes with the camera. The S60/70 is compact and metal, it is durable. I bounced my S30 on concrete about 3 times, all you notice are very small dents in the metal body on two corners.

The size and the widenangle + panorama feature make it a very nice camera for landscapes and hiking, in my opinion. It also has full manual controls, and very good white balance settings.

The S series are loved for their image quality by a lot of users. The S60/70 has a 3.4x zoom lens I think, and it is able to make good macro photos. I have made a lot of great macro photos with my ageing S30, its 3 to 4 year old sybling.

All in all, you should check this camera out IMHO.