CAMERA ADVICE: I’ve gotten a lot of emails like this one, from Hiawatha Bray:

I wondered if you could give me advice on digital cameras. I have to select one for my church, and wanted to spend around $500. You’ve used a bunch of them. What would you suggest?

I’ve been very happy with this Sony DSC-P93, which costs a lot less than $500. The fancier DSC-P100 has a better lens — a Carl Zeiss rather than the gussied-up video camera lens that mine has — which matters if you care a lot about quality, but which won’t make a difference in ordinary use. The downside, and the reason I picked the other one, is that the DSC-P100 uses a proprietary battery, which the 93 uses AA batteries.

This is something I feel strongly about, as I think that any camera you depend on should be able to use off-the-shelf batteries in a pinch. (My Nikon D70 uses proprietary rechargeables, but it comes with an adapter that lets you use storebought batteries, so apparently Nikon agrees.) And for a church camera, where there may be crossed wires in terms of who’s responsible for keeping the batteries charged, that seems like an important consideration, too.

It’s probably overkill for a church camera — but maybe not — but the biggest bang-for-the-buck digital camera out there is the DSC-F717 which is available for under $500 and which is capable of professional-caliber results. (See this gallery of cockpit photos by a Marine aviator in Afghanistan for examples.)

I’ve also been really happy with my Toshiba, which you can find for sale dirt-cheap now that Toshiba has gone out of the digicam business. It shoots video, and will even take an external mike, which makes it kind of cool for blog journalism. It’s not nearly as pocketable as the Sony, though. But it’s cheap! And although it’s only a 3.2 megapixel camera, its excellent Canon lens produces good images. (Sample picture here).

And speaking of cheap, I’m giving this Kodak digital camera to the Insta-Daughter for Christmas. (She never reads InstaPundit, so I can post this safely.) It’s reportedly very kid-friendly, and largely indestructible. And it’s cheap enough that it it turns out to be not quite indestructible, it’s an annoyance not a disaster.

The truth is that it’s hard to go wrong in the digital camera marketplace right now. There are a lot of good cameras out there, and they’re cheap. Some other photo posts here, here, here, and here.

And if you wind up buying Nikon or Canon digital SLRs, be sure to note that there are rebates available on both. Don’t miss ’em.

UPDATE: Here’s a New York Times review of ten digital cameras under $300, by David Pogue.