I decided to buy a new point a click camera and given I had a gift voucher from JB Hi-Fi they had the inside running on the purchase. First stop though was the internet and a miriad of photography sites that assess every aspect of a camera that your average point and click camera user could ever care to think about. I started knowing (I thought) the prices I wanted to pay, which started out as less than $250 and with a $100 voucher that would make for a reasonably good but I figured.
Now image quality seemed an important feature to me, not important enough to buy a SLR camera at $800 plus, but naturally you want your photos to look good. I wanted to capture shots of a sorts team so it had to be able to zoom well enough to capture people on the far side of the football field, and have enough megapixels that I could crop the shot a bit and still be able to publish it on our teams website. Given most cameras do all of this, it was a matter of finding which camera did it best in the price range. Oh and as a bit of a geek, I'd quite like one that was wireless so I wouldn't need to connect the camera to the computer.
Well after reviewing cameras review sites for three or four weeks I had almost bought myself to the point where I couldn't find a camera that was quite right, well not in the price range I started out looking at. It turned out JB Hi-Fi stocked cameras that were generally over a year old, meaning some of the new features weren't available. I only wanted to point a click I thought but now I was comparing the shots cameras made when taking a shot of something a long way away, much further than the other side of the football field.
I'd looked at so many camera and read so many reviews, that I'd brought myself to a point where it didn't look like I'd ever make a decision. In Part 2 - how I decided what to buy and why.
