Looking for a holiday gift guide for the best cameras under $200?  Nothing is more fun that watching someone you love open a gift you know they will love.  For most adults, nothing is more fun than opening a new digital camera.  If you are stumped on what to get your partner, a camera is perfect since it lets them take pictures of your children or other important things in their life.  The only problem with getting a camera, however, is that they can easily be out of a normal person’s budget, especially during this recession. Luckily, our holiday gift guide is filled with the best cameras under $200, most of which are under $150!

Best Holiday Gift Guide: Best Cameras Under $200

Struggling to find that perfect gift for your husband or wife without breaking your budget? What about that perfect gift for Mom and Dad? One gift that is sure to make someone smile this Christmas season is a new digital camera.  Many people assume that you can’t get a good digital camera for under $500, something that is not true. While they may not have as many bells and whistles, there are thousands of wonderful cameras on the market today that are under $200.

The trick, is finding the camera with the best features for the price.  While you can get just about everything with an expensive camera, cheaper cameras are made for specific purposes, being in many cases better for some photographers who focus on only taking a certain type of pictures.  For most families, however, you can get everything you need for taking great pictures of family for under $200, something that we are proud to prove with our holiday gift guide!

Best Cameras for Under $200

In our opinion, 2011 has been a great year for digital cameras. Not only has there been breakthroughs in technology, but many high end cameras have majorly gone down in price, allowing the average middle class photographer to have a high end camera.  In our holiday guide, we have focuses on only finding the best cameras for under $200, including older cameras that have had great price breaks.  The best cameras for under $200 include:

• Samsung SH100
• Nikon S3100
• Canon Powershot SX150
• Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ47
• Canon SX230

Best Holiday Gift Guide Tips for Cameras

To the surprise of many holiday shoppers, some of these cameras are already being planned to be on Black Friday lists this year.  Due to some of these cameras being under $100, you can expect to pay under $50 for some of these cameras during the holiday season, especially if you are willing to search for deals.   While looking, make sure to bring our holiday gift guide with you to make sure you get the best camera for the money!

The Samsung TL220 Dual View Digital Camera is a smart little camera that not only has a real LCD screen but a revolutionary industry feature a 1.5″ front LCD screen. Set up the perfect shot with you in it with great new front screen.

The Samsung Digital Camera provides perfect features including the 4.6x/s7mm lens to the 3.0″ Touch Screen makes this Samsung Digital Camera a true must-have.

All photographers, new and experienced, will appreciate the TL220′s simple navigation. The Samsung TL220 comes equipped with a true color filtered 12.2 megapixel CCD with a powerful 4.6x optical zoom which almost guarantees the sharpest images.

The 27mm wide angle lens provides a wider shooting range from a shorter distance with greater flexibility than similarly priced digital cameras.

Delivering an unrivalled user experience, the 1.5″ LCD located on the front of the Samsung TL220 Dual View camera now allows consumers to take first-rate photos whether they are behind the camera or in front of it.

Also, Samsung’s innovative Smart Face Recognition technology will memorize up to 20 faces and adjust the focus and exposure to the most high-ranked faces on the camera. It also allows users to sort images by registered faces and scroll through to find images of people in their Smart Album instead of viewing every single photo.

This feature will be of great importance especially to those individuals who love social networking and uploading personal profiles.

While the Canon EOS 7D, Olympus EP-1, or Nikon D3000Digital Camera offer great digital they are sometimes more than the armature photographer is looking for. If this is you look no further, the Samsung TL220 Digital Camera might just be the perfect digital camera for you.

A framing guide helps all digital camera novices to ensure the exact picture they want. Especially for the younger snapper this dual view is perfect to be included in all shots.

The exterior design for this Samsung digital camera is sleek and stylish. There is a 3-inch LCD , touch-screen interface which is almost the entire size of the camera, which measure 3.7-inches wide. There are unique features that very few digital cameras have, thus you will have a higher grade of control over how your photographs are set up and taken.

Product Rating:

Overall Rating: 4/5 Stars

Main Features and Technologies:

To start off this unique Samsung digital camera comes with a touch-screen interface. Instead of physical buttons on the back of the camera, nearly the whole rear-side is an LCD monitor. Throughout this monitor you are able to choose between various shooting programs and styles. While this is a high-tech way to operate a camera, the touch screen can be tricky and sometimes choose the wrong setting that you desired.

There are numerous shooting programs that this Samsung digital camera will provide you. Some of the most unique shooting options include Face Detection as well as Smile Detection technologies. However, my personal favorite setting is the Blink Detection System. This unique feature will detect if a person has blinked, which is ideal when taking photographs with children. Another technology that will enhance your photographs is the shadow detail enhancement system. This feature will enhance details within shadows that would normally be bland or completely lost with other comparable digital cameras.

You will be able to enjoy continuous shooting with a swift capture rate of 2 frames-per-second. This is double the speed of standard continuous shooting modes, which use a normal rate of 1 frame-per-second. This is a great digital camera for taking a wide range of photographs.

Of course, like most other digital cameras, you will be able to take videos. The video quality of this digital camera is 720p, which is very nice. You will be able to watch your movies in brilliant clarity on a smaller high-definition television. I wouldn’t recommend watching video on a large-screen TV because the video noise will far outweigh the quality.

Pros:

With a unique touch-screen control panel and decent shooting modes and options, this camera is fun to use. The exterior design is very desirable and you will enjoy carrying this digital camera with you.

Cons:

The images are lacking a crispness that other 14.7-megapixel cameras contain. If you are looking for a professional-quality digital camera, then I would not buy this Samsung product.

Worthy Accessory:

The Sandisk 4GB SD Memory Card is essential for this Samsung digital camera, and with an average price of only $5 when bought on Amazon.com, you’ll save almost $100 and be able to capture hundreds of photographs.

by Jonathan McLelland

It seems that life goes by faster these days, and because of this digital cameras offer the ability to easily capture and remember those memorable moments that pass by too quickly. The Samsung 10.2 Megapixel Digital Camera, Model: EC-SL420BBP/US has been developed for those who want an excellent camera without a ton of bells and whistles. I really enjoyed this camera because of its superior simplicity. With an average price tag of only $180, it is one of the most affordable high-powered compact digital cameras on the market.

Product Rating:

Camera Technologies: 4/5 Stars
Picture Quality: 4/5 Stars
User-Friendliness: 4/5 Stars
Overall Rating: 4/5 Stars

Main Features and Technologies:

The first feature that I want to talk about within this Samsung Digital Camera is the 10.2 megapixel count. When you have a camera that features this many pixels, every photograph you take will be full of detail and lush with color. If you plan on taking photographs and then wanting to enlarge them you will be able to easily do so without losing any picture quality, or gaining image graininess.

Another great feature is the smart auto focus. This unique feature will automatically choose the appropriate scene selection based on the environment you are shooting in. There are a total of eleven different scenes that this camera will choose from and you will also be able to manually choose between the various scenes.

Every photograph you capture will be completely smooth and steady due to the highly advanced dual image stabilization system. This unique image stabilization system utilizes not only one but two different methods of capturing a photograph. These include digital image stabilization as well as optical stabilization. When you have both of these systems working together you will never have to worry about a photograph turning out blurry or hazy. This is an excellent feature to have especially if you enjoy going to sporting events.

On the rear of this digital camera, you will be able to enjoy a large LCD viewing screen that measures 2.7-inches. This screen will allow you to clearly see the subjects you are shooting to make sure that your frame is exactly how you want it.

This Samsung Digital Camera features a total internal memory space of 40MB, which will allow you to store your images and videos directly on the camera. You can, however, expand the memory of this camera with an SD, MMC and SDHC memory card. Transferring your images is extremely easy through the USB 2.0 interface, however, if your computer has a memory card slot, you can simply insert your media card into the slot and your photographs will be instantly uploaded into your computer.

by Jonathan McLelland

Many smart photographers have told me the best camera is the one you have with you. Since you can take a Samsung S860 just about anywhere, that means it’ll wear the “best” title by default. And that’s pretty much the only way it could.

That’s not to say it’s a bad camera. It’s inexpensive at around $63, it take common SD cards and it features a 3X optical zoom. But it’s hamstrung by several liabilities that keep it from excelling.

First is its very nature: It’s a compact digital camera. Even with an 8.1-megapixel sensor, it is never going to capture the rich colors and sharp lines of a single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. Its imaging sensor is just too small to compete with even entry-level SLRs.

Second, it’s not the easiest camera to use. The user interface is hardly intuitive, and many of its options and settings are buried in digital menus on the rear LCD screen. If you think like a photographer, this will frustrate you. Programmers for a certain large software firm may feel right at home, though. This made it hard for me to use manual modes to alter shutter speeds and ISO settings for getting exactly the right shot. So I decided to be conservative and leave it on AUTO.

Finally, it’s not the most reliably camera. When the camera powers up, its lens telescopes out of its body. To turn off, it retreats back inward. Any bit of debris can hamper its ability to power up or shut down – a bit of dust was enough to cause me some trouble as I was learning to use it. Months later, I was perched on a glacier using a Leatherman tool to scrape a mysterious substance of the side of the lens body. I was able to clear enough of it to cajole the camera to power down.

Despite these three pitfalls, I have a hard time disliking the S860. It was there for me under circumstances in which I didn’t want to risk the life of my Pentax K100D Super SLR. It managed a few decent photos and some video clips. Will I hang any of those in a 20 X 24 frame? No, but they’re good enough to print in a smaller size, e-mail to friends and conjure memories of some great adventures. And that makes it a pretty darn good camera.

by Justin Schmid