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ishturkish
06-06-2005, 12:09 AM
Hello,

I'm looking for an ultra-compact, go anywhere camra, that will mainly be used for outdoor stills and short movies. It will serve as my travel camera once I get a DSLR (it will serve as my main camera until then). Price range is 300-400$

I really love the idea of an mpeg4 movie encoder on one of these tiny cameras, so I can get decent size films on a 1 gig card. So far I only found:

Canon EX-Z750 (not a fan of the Casio brand, and it is a bit pricey at $400)
Pentax Optio S5z (This is only available at very few retailers, and I haven't seen too many reviews for it).

Am I missing any others with these features?
trikster2
06-06-2005, 12:28 AM
Hello,

I'm looking for an ultra-compact, go anywhere camra, that will mainly be used for outdoor stills and short movies. It will serve as my travel camera once I get a DSLR (it will serve as my main camera until then). Price range is 300-400$

I really love the idea of an mpeg4 movie encoder on one of these tiny cameras, so I can get decent size films on a 1 gig card. So far I only found:

Canon EX-Z750 (not a fan of the Casio brand, and it is a bit pricey at $400)
Pentax Optio S5z (This is only available at very few retailers, and I haven't seen too many reviews for it).

Am I missing any others with these features?

I was in this same boat and went witht the EX-750. Great little camera and wonderful little movies.

It's a little bigger but the casio P-505 has better video (stereo and has zoom).

Also Sony makes a really funky camera that does mpeg-4. (M something?) Review on this site did not seem to like the movies to much, but if it is brand that you are looking for, there you go.

Panasonic makes a little Mpeg4 recorder that takes something like 2 meg pictures. Pretty cheap but my gosh 2 megapixels, that is so 90's.

Did not really dig up any other options. In theory with a big memory card you could give up the mpeg4 requirement and just get any ole camera that does 640x480 30fps. Knock the size down in post processing if you need smaller sizes for emailing or storing or what not.

While I could maybe give up the MPEG-4, I won't give up Casio's cool "past movie mode". Really nice feature that starts recording 5 seconds or so before you push the shutter key down......