I have 300 dollars to spend.I want to buy a high quality camera that produces high quality pictures with the amount I have to spend.Any suggestions?(I'm aware I can't get the best product available with only 300 dollars..). Created by Cathy J.. arts-humanities-en - visual-arts-en - photography-en

For "high quality pictures," one key thing to look for is an adequately large sensor. Try to step up from the common 1/2.5" sensor to the better 1/1.8", 1/1.7" or 1/1.6" sensors. You can find this information at http://www.dpreview.com/

This will bump you right into the over-$300 category most of the time, though, so get ready for that.

I love my Canon Powershot SD950-IS, which sells for about $330 now. If you want to see some SD950 photos, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/samfeinstein/tags/sd9... From there, you can also choose to "See all public photos tagged with SD950is" if you want. Some of these are not so much beautiful photos as they are to illustrate a point for answers, but you can still look at the image to evaluate the quality. If they have been altered, I will mention that in the description.

Some compact cameras to consider with a decent sensor and image quality include, but are not limited to:

Canon Powershot A650-IS

Canon Powershot SD950-IS

Casio EX-Z1080

Fujifilm FinePix F50fd

Fujifilm FinePix F100fd

Kodak C875

Kodak V803

Nikon Coolpix P5000

Nikon Coolpix P5100

Nikon Coolpix S700

Pentax Optio A40

Samsung NV20

Sony DSC-S800

Sony DSC-W300

DCReed

I'd go to dpreview.com and search for the features you want. Unfortunately, one of the filters is not price (in my mind that's a serious oversight on their part).

I'd recommend searching for something of 6mp or 8mp, a good optical zoom (Zoom tele option), something with an aperture- and shutter-priority mode. RAW (uncompressed) would be nice, but I don't think that's gonna be in your price range.

Kodak Z710 maybe. Never used it, but a friend has a Kodak he likes a lot. The Kodak P712 has all I've mentioned above and a RAW mode.