Ultra compact needed with low budget

[ab500]

Budget

Under 300 dollars

Size

Previous camera was a Sony DSCU20 Cyber-shot 2MP Digital Camera, looking for something with the same ultra-compactness. I carry my camera around with me day to day and need something that fits in my pocket comfortably.

Features

Image quality is important to me, just up to the point where the pictures will look good on 8x10 printouts. The more MP the better so I can crop pictures down without them getting pixilated. Manual controls won’t get any use from me, I like point and shoot. Fast start-up and ready times are good. Battery life needs to be good.

General Usage

Camera is a point and shoot camera, I will have it on me most of the time so it needs to be built to last. I don’t make many big prints of my pictures but I do a lot of photo touchup and different digital projects so I would like some extra resolution so the pictures don’t look bad when cropped and the such. I probably will be shooting inside and due to the nature of my usage lighting conditions won’t be ideal most the time. I do keep in mind some of the basics of photography so a lot of my pictures come out ok.

Basically I need a camera that I can whip out at the spur of the moment and take pictures with. I’m a high school student so it needs to be durable and sexy. All suggestions are welcome, thanks!

[coldrain]

The only ultra compacts that are as small as the sony you mention and that have very good image quality, are the Canon digital elph 20SD and digital elph SD30.

Both are 5mpixel, the SD20 has a single focal lens, and the SD30 has a zoom lens. Both give amazing quality for their size.
The SD30 is a little bit above your 300$ budget, the SD20 should be well below it.

Then there is a group of cameras that are a little bit bigger, like the rest of Canon's digital elph series, some sony's, casio's and the Fuji Z1.
But if you want to stick to ultra ultra compact, then the Canon SD20 and SD30 seem the most obvious choices. Another camera of the same very small size is the Sony DSC-L1, but Jeff Keller in his review here was not totally impressed with its image quality.
I did read a good review of it though in a german photo magazine, so maybe it is worth checking out anyway.

[ab500]

At our local camera store the lady showed me a Dimage x60 (reading a review for it was how I found this site), I'm not sure if thats a little bit bigger then my old camera but it could definately fit the bill. Had a 2.5" screen on it too. Any other cameras in that same class?

[coldrain]

At our local camera store the lady showed me a Dimage x60 (reading a review for it was how I found this site), I'm not sure if thats a little bit bigger then my old camera but it could definately fit the bill. Had a 2.5" screen on it too. Any other cameras in that same class?


The x60 is not as compact, and yes there are quite a lot of cameras in that class.
The Sony cybershot DSC-T5 and Fuji finepix Z1 have the same form factor, and the Z1 is the best of these 3 image quality wise.

Canon and Casio have the digital Elph sd400/450 and the exilim EX-Z55. Nikon has the coolpix 5900.

A lot of cameras that you could look at if you do not want the ultra ultra small ones like the canon sd20/30 and your old DSC-U20.

Look at the review part of this site to see what you think if the cameras, their performance and image quality, there is a lot of information to be found.

[snoopygirl]

under $300 you have some super fun cameras like the aforementioned Canons but also consider the Samsung Digimax i5

http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/samsung/digimax_i5-review/index.shtml

which I have found for as low as $260 linked on this site.