Jason Dunn

innersky

Paul P

TRAITOR!!!!

j/k

Kirk Stephens

jdhill

Jonathon Watkins

__________________
Professional photographer in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire specialising in Wedding photography, Events & Portraits

Will T Smith

In terms of competition, one does so with price and capacity. There is nothing inherint in this xD format that provides the consumer with any value.

The question of capacity is a question of density. One can achieve higher capacities with the other existing form factors. Especially with CompactFlash, which is an open standard.

This is not really technology, it's marketing. They are trying to sell cameras like HP sells printers. You buy their mechanism, now you must buy THEIR cartridges. Using CF or SD, they cannot exclusive rights to sell the "film".

In the end, I don't think this strategy will be successful. The market is already saturated with deployed alternatives. This xD format has ZERO technical advantages and no size advantages. The promoters are betting that the quality of their cameras will be enough to sway users into their proprietary pit.

Like SmartMedia before it, I believe that this xD format is doomed to failure. It will cause far more problems in the market place than it is worth.

Fed up

Kre

Peseta

The S330 is the improved version of the S300 [or Digital Ixus 300]. I'm a happy owner of one of these since a little more than 1 year.
Hardly any flaws, and the 2 megapixel has always been enough untill now. I bought it because of the size and solid build.
I always carry it with me, on my belt in the official case of about � 30 in The Netherlands [~ $30, certainly worth its price], even in my professional life when I wear a suit. It's gone through a lot, but still works like a charm. It's however just too heavy to wear in a shirt- or jacketpocket at 275 gramms.
Pictures are almost always good, with as a weak point the flash range [issue with all ultra compact cameras]. In time I've been able to learn to work with the limited flash and limited settings to achieve nice results also in special conditions. One rule: just take a few extra pictures when in doubt of the result using diffrent white ballance, light correction or flash settings.

What I really like as a bonus is the waterproof case [30 meters under water] for about � 250, which I use on the beach, sailing and a friend of mine borrowed it for diving.

The S330 [or Digital Ixus 330] is about the same, with essentially some more setting available and a partly other button layout. So if you don't need the extra settings and find a S300 [or digital Ixus 300] for a significant lower price, don't hesitate to buy that one.

At http://www.megapixel.net/html/issueindex.html and http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/ you can find great reviews of most available cameras [not always the same conclusion to keep it interesting, DPreview often a bit more strict on image quality].

Alternatives in my view:
- Only ultra compacts are small enough to allways take with you wherever you go, because there's nothing more frustrating than to need the camera and having left it at home.
- Always take a camera with at least 3x zoom
- CF-card [if you have a PocketPC] because of cheap memory and the ability to view and show your pictures directly with no or commonly available accessoiry [Ipaq, Toshiba e310, etc.] or optionally SD-card when owning a PPC 2002 device [more expensive]
- metall body preferably to be able to take a punch

This gives at this moment as ultra compact alternatives for the Canon:

- Minolta Dimage X: also 2 Megapixel, extremely compact and light [wearable in shirtpocket], picture quality a bit less [I might have bought it today if I hadn't owned my Canon yet]. SD-cards still expensive
- Pentax Optio 330 or 430. About the same weight and size of the Canon, but 3 resp. 4 Megapixels and a bit more pricy. If you often want to print large pictures this is useful, however with my 2 megapixels I get satisfactory results at near A4/Letter size.


Hope this helps with your decision.

One extra tip:
Buy at least one extra battery and a large memory card [>128 MB]. You'll need them.