Hi, I normally take photos with my phone but they always turn out rubbish. What's a good digicam for someone starting to get into photography? I heard Sony Cybershots are good and they look very cool!

Get the Sony Cybershot DSC-W170. 10.1 megapixels, 5x optical zoom, compact, easy to use, superb prints.

With that resolution, aren't files horribly large and slow to upload? p
Pse post a few of your high res pics for us to open in DaisyTrail.

10 megapixels = about 2.2Mb each, according to this page - that's not too terrible really... that's assuming it stores them as JPEG and not RAW. I'm guessing it's more SLR's that store as RAW? Not sure really.

The calculator on that web-page is wrong:

For any jpeg compression setting, the compressed file size depends upon what was in the original image.

For example, if you sharpen an image before compression, it will result in a larger JPEG. The same happens if the original image is noisy - to the compression algorithm, this noise appears to be extra detail.

With my 7.1MP Olympus SP-550uz camera:

RAW files are about 10MB
SHQ JPEGs are about 2.5 to 3MB
HQ JPEGs are about 1.5 to 2MB

The number of "mega-pixels" is mostly marketing spin:

Cramming more pixels onto a small sensor results in higher noise - especially in dim light. Often the camera overcomes this noise by increasingly aggressive "noise reduction" which also reduces the detail.

try one of these
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/pocket-battleships.shtml

Ta for the explanation richard.

stubbsy - yeah, the Canon G10 is getting quite positive reviews - still quite a small sensor apparently, but apparently gets very nice results for outdoors shots. £380's quite pricey though.

What is your budget? Somewhere in the £100 area?

Say £200 max?

Oooh. For £370 I could get the Pentax K100D, with a large 1 x 2.5inch sensor @ 6 megapixels.

Maybe if I ask everyone I know to club together for an xmas pressie...