The first reviewer gave a very low rate to this great camera, not fair. So I feel I should jump in.
When I decided to upgrade my old Canon S100, I was very clear on four things:
1) It must use AA batteries. Firm, very firm on this. As long as you must carry a charger, you end up never take the camera with you. As simple as that.
2) It must have macro mode to take good close up pictures. Without this, for example, your gadgets look horrible when you sell them on eBay.
3) It must do good enough video recording for occasional and short motion pictures. I always hate to take a camcorder with me, but I do find sometimes I miss it.
4) It must use SD or CF cards, not XD cards. SD/CF are popular and cheap and they have large capacity. Easy to insert them into my laptop, PDA or image bank to transfer images and/or view them.
So, that narrows down my searching to three models: Nikon Coolpix 3200, Kodak CX7430 and Pentax optio43WR.
The video taken from 3200 sucks, especially indoor video is garbage ¨C way too noisy. It¡¯s ruled out first. BTW, if you are going to take some video of your children indoor, don¡¯t get this 3200. The CX7430 takes fantastic indoor video, but I never be able to get a focused close up picture. Sadly put it out of this game.
The Pentax fulfilles all my needs and is clearly the keeper. It uses just 2 AA batteries and it is very compact. If I want longer battery life, I can use widely available CR-V3 batteries as well. Perfect. Its super macro mode is even better than the 3200 (1cm vs. 2cm). I could take a picture that just covers a dime with sharp focus, or a picture of my SMD circuit boards showing clearly the tiny components and their printed values. This is a surprise, because Coolpix series is well known for their super macro capability and Pentax only claims 10cm macro in its specs (a typo?).
It takes fantastic video outdoor and indoor. Even at very low light conditions, the video still look good (like CX7430, with some noise, but not annoying at all). Video recorded at 640x480@15 is smooth enough and, at 30, it is totally free of jerkiness. However, I did find that recording is not reliable at 30fps, it pauses every 10 seconds or so, but it might be due to my slow SD card (a SanDisk 256MB, not an ultra one). Anyway, 15 fps is good enough to me and I¡¯ll never need to carry a camcorder again, that¡¯s for sure.
43WR has many more features, but I cannot list them all. Unique water resistant, of course. Its lenses do not extend out like most cameras, very nice. It starts up very quickly (less than 2 seconds) and lags between shots are very short (about 2-3 seconds with flash). I have no idea why some reviewers such as Steves-digicams say it¡¯s slow. Actually, it even has a quick-start feature: when this feature is enabled (not by default), you don¡¯t need to press the power button first; you simply press the shot button and the camera will turn on and take a picture right way within about just one second, very handy. Its buttons and menus are very well designed. The LCD screen is very good, even under the sunlight. You can see thumbernails and zoom pictures. It displays multiple languages including Chinese. There are no doors at the bottom side; so you don¡¯t need to take the camera off a tripod to change batteries and SD cards. Overall, a very thoughtful product, which is harder and harder to see on market. Oh, for those who cares, the camera is made in Japan (other accessories may not).
The bottom line is: if you don¡¯t care about the video side, the Nikon 3200 is fine. If you don¡¯t take dime pictures, the Kodak CX7430 is decent. If you want all, the 43WR is the one, the only one right now.
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