Digital cameras: Searching high and low for the right one

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A new credit-card sized digital camera from Logitech is small enough to put in a shirt pocket but powerful enough to snap photos indoors and at night.

The Pocket Digital 130 sports a strobe flash for indoor and night shots and a slim stainless steel body with a sliding cover to protect the lens and viewfinder. It has 16 megabytes of internal memory that can store 40 photos at a high resolution.

This handy little camera has a built-in lithium battery that automatically recharges whenever the camera is connected to a Universal Serial Bus (USB) port on a Windows PC or Macintosh.

Ready for the big surprise? The price is right at $150.

In the mid-range area, tech expert Stephen Wildstrom recommends the $400 Kyocera Finecam SL300R. It weighs under 5 oz. and is about the size of a deck of cards. To keep it thin and the lens design simple, it is hinged so the half that contains the lens and flash rotates to a horizontal position.

You will like the fact that it's always ready to shoot without any boot-up time, you can take 3.5 photos per second, and there's no perceptible lag between pressing the button and the shutter firing. It has a 1.5 inch LCD display and a 3-to-1 zoom that ranges from moderate wide angle to short telephoto.

Wildstrom predicts that, in the future, disposable cameras will be replaced by digitals that are returned in to have pictures printed. That's how the first Eastman Kodak consumer cameras worked in 1888.

Long Island Technology Articles > Digital cameras: Searching high and low for the right one