Does anyone use an olympus sp-350?

[jchump5415]

We are looking into buying a new camera and thinking of the canon s3 or the olympus sp-350. I see alot of people seem to like the canon but has anyone used these olympus...they are $100 off right now at costco so it is a hard deal to pass up.

 

[gregr]

Hi-
The two cameras have very different specs so it's kinda hard to compare them to each other. You can see what I mean by looking at this comparison page. The first most significant difference to me is the lens. The Canon has a very long zoom (432mm) versus a fairly short zoom (114mm) on the Oly. As I scan down that page I see some other pretty big differences that make the Canon look a whole lot better, on paper anyways.
It's always a good idea to go to a camera store and handle each model to see how you like them.
Greg

 

[jchump5415]

So I guess I should say in the 300-500 dollar range what would be the best buy for someone to use for tank photos. I know very little about cameras. Would be interested in doing close shots of individual polyps but I am not really interested in changing out lens and all that stuff.

 

[gregr]

If you want to do super close close-ups then you'll want the S3 over the SP-350 because it has that super macro mode where the lens can focus on something practically touching the lens- the Oly has ok macros but not that close!
You might want to take a look at the Canon S2 if you can find it new- the S3 had some good changes but nothing huge (slightly bigger sensor and lcd are the major differences I think).
If you like the Olympus brand the
SP-510 is a closer match to the S3/S2. I've not played with any of these cameras- just looked at the specs on dpreview so I can't tell you anything about the image quality/noise factor. If you have the time, try to go to the appropriate forum on dpreview and look at samples full screen on your monitor to guage the picture quality. Look at the shadow areas, especially on pictures shot at higher iso's (400, 800) to see how grainy/noisy they are.
Hope this helps,
Greg