I have been looking at different digital cameras....I bought my dad a Sony DSC-10 and liked it, but the camera was slow to turn on...and often would take forever if it had trouble focusing on somethinng. I wanted to get a T1, but I heard that the flash sucks and indoor pictures look bad. Any other suggestions?

What's your budget range?

around $450 or less and I am looking for a 5 mp one

I have used a Minolta Dimage G500 quite a bit. It is a nice 5MP camera with quite a few bells and whistles for less than $400. It is very compact, has an excellent battery life, takes good color quality pictures, and supports both SD/MMC and Memory Stick. It's worth checking out.

EDIT: I have a buddy who loves his Canon PowerShot A80. It is only 4MP, but it takes some nice pictures.

www.dpreview.com

They have more camera review than you can shake a bundle of sticks at.

-Zeke

Quote:
I have a buddy who loves his Canon PowerShot A80. It is only 4MP, but it takes some nice pictures.

I got a Powershot A80 back in February and it is the Bee's Knees.

The Dimage X series machines are really fast starting up. They almost qualify as instant on.
Solidly made, without those annoying telescoping snouts you have to be so carefull not to strip the gears of.

Regardless of which camera you choose, be sure to get the fastest media possible (different flash memory cards write data at different speeds). A fast card will improve almost any camera's response times.

-Zeke

The speed of the media isn't majorly important unless you're taking a lot of shots in a row. The camera itself should have an internal buffer which stores the pictures until it has time to write them out. Obviously if you take too many too quickly then you'll have to wait for it to save them.

Rob Galbraith's CF Database page is useful. Even if you're not using CompactFlash cards, he brings up several points which are relevant for the rmedia types. Sometimes the manufacturers will switch controllers or flash chips part way through a product lifetime so what got tested as an amazing card by one person might turn out to be a mediocre card for another.

My experience has been that it can have a large influence on start-up time and the time lag between record and play mode, as well as responsiveness when navigating inside play mode. I'm sure this varies somewhat between camera models, but in no case will a faster card hurt your performance.

-Zeke

Yeah. All three of the things you've mentioned are dependent on the speed of the card. Read speed for startup and navigation and write speed on switching as it has to write everything in it's buffer to the drive. Usually the read speed for all but the worst cards is more than most consumer cameras can handle.

Faster cards can't hurt but you don't need to spend mega bucks on some ultra super expensive turbo card. I've got a bunch of budget CF cards and I've never had any trouble. My IXUS 300 has enough shutter lag caused by the autofocus system anyway

so has anyone else tried the T1? what are your thoughts on it?

i like my t1
http://l0ser.net/gallery
all except for .glam are taken with t1

What type of pipe system were you using there and what's all the blue stuff? I'm guessing it's not solvent weld?

the blue stuff is Christy's Red Hot Blue Glue

pipe system?
as in : an underground sprinkler system?
or something else?