Ideal touring digital compact?

[bikepacker]

My grandson is going on a field trip with his college and needed a camera. He may be in a situation where he cannot plug in a charger so wanted something that was compact and took ordinary batteries. Looking on Dpreview for ideas I came up with the Powershot A1300, AA batteries, optical viewfinder with screen switch off, light and compact. Ordered it on Thursday it came yesterday and I had a play with it. Yes the lens lacks a little quality, it lacks manual control and it is restricted to Jpegs, but for the price it is okay.

For under £70 it is a marvellous little camera, ideal for touring. I shall be borrowing it back next year to take with me.

[Kim]

No CHDK for that model, unfortunately.   

For the uninitiated, that's an open-source alternative firmware that adds all manner of features (proper manual control, ability to shoot RAW, bracketing, histogram, that sort of thing) to otherwise good but functionally-crippled Canon compacts.

http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK

[fuaran]

For a similar sort of thing, I notice Argos have the Powershot A810 for £50. It looks like the main difference from the A1300 is it lacks an optical viewfinder. Plus apparently the A810 it is supported by CHDK.

[bikepacker]

My grandson will only use it in auto mode so CHDK isn't necessary. Getting him to use the optical viewfinder will save on batteries.

[andyoxon]

Just an observation on AA batteries and camera use.  Many moons ago when I had on Oly compact which took AA batteries, I found that it chewed through std alkaline AA batteries really quickly, and it was only by buying NiMH rechargeables that I could rely on a decent charged period.  The lithium Batteries for my lumix are very small, can last all day (300+ photos?) and available for ~£7, currently; I have three.  Li-Ions also hold there charge well, unlike many NiMHs.  So I guess I'm saying, one really does need to be in the total wilds, and without a portable USB charger to need AAs IMO.

[Kim]

While I accept that proprietary Li⁺ batteries work well (especially if you can charge them in situ with a simple USB cable), nobody's going to be using NiCads any more.  Good quality NiMH cells are a much more competent badger.

[andyoxon]

Sorry I meant NiMH... amended.

[mcshroom]

I've found to my annoyance (as I've misplaced the charger) that Fujifilm cameras don't charge their batteries from the usb cable. I'd recommend avoiding them for this purpose, although the T200 I have seems to take decent enough pictures.

For touring now I'm going to use my old Samsung s5560 phone, the camera seems decent enough and I have three batteries for it. The phone is also a back up for my main android phone, so I get to back up two things at the same time

[LEE]

Amazingly my £50 Canon A495, that I bought to document my PBP year, has become my camera of choice.

This is entirely down to that fact that it's "good enough most of the time" and I don't care if I drop it.

AA batteries were a pre-requisite for such a camera.

A high-end DSLR is no good if you haven't got it in your Jersey pocket.

[bikepacker]

I hope the picture isn't taken on your PBP otherwise you took a wrong turning somewhere.    The hills and mountains in the background are one of my wife's favourite walking places.

[Wombat]

Just an observation on AA batteries and camera use.  Many moons ago when I had on Oly compact which took AA batteries, I found that it chewed through std alkaline AA batteries really quickly, and it was only by buying NiMH rechargeables that I could rely on a decent charged period.  The lithium Batteries for my lumix are very small, can last all day (300+ photos?) and available for ~£7, currently; I have three.  Li-Ions also hold there charge well, unlike many NiMHs.  So I guess I'm saying, one really does need to be in the total wilds, and without a portable USB charger to need AAs IMO.

Olympus have a history of poor battery management in their compacts.  Many refused to run on alkalines at all, yet said that the freshly charged NiMhs you had just installed were flat, after 4 or 5 shots.  They tried to tell us that it was our stock of NiMhs at fault.  I put new ones in one of the 15 Olympuses we had, took the 4 or 5, it crapped out, then put those same cells in my wife's Fuji compact and took 350 photos with it, many using flash.  Olympus then agreed there was a problem, but refused to make any financial concession over it.  We replaced them all with Fujis...