Those with photographic fathers are spoilt for choice: there are superb choices available no matter what you’re looking for, whether it’s a compact, DLSR or video camera.

Take the Canon Digital Ixus 95 IS, for instance. It may cost £172, but for that money you’re getting Labs-winning quality that is, according to photography expert David Fearon, “the best compact camera for under £200″ and includes unbeatable picture quality alongside a broad range of features. If you’ve got the cash, then you evidently can’t go wrong with the Canon.

If your budget is a bit tighter, though, the A List alternative is almost as good. The Nikon Coolpix S220 was a runner-up in the same Labs test, winning praise for its flawless outdoor quality and  impressive detail. It’s also only £122 so, if you’re looking for a bargain camera that doesn’t skimp on quality, this is worth investigating.

If you’ve got more cash to splash, though, a DLSR could be the perfect gift for the serious snapper. Our favourite is the Nikon D90, which packs in fantastic image quality, a huge range of features and a stunning lens; it’s so good that it makes the £730 asking price feel like a bargain.

If you’d like to buy your favourite parent a DLSR on a budget, though, the Olympus E-420 is a capable camera that costs relatively little – £260, to be exact. It’s got excellent image quality and an impressive range of features but, if you’re buying on a budget, won’t break the bank.

Should your father be into the moving rather than static image, our favourite pair of digital video cameras will delight your dad. The HDC-SD100 is Panasonic’s first CMOS camera and the results are superb, with exemplary image quality and a wide range of features costing just £443, and the Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD2000 is a pocket-sized package that crams high-quality video capture into a 311g package.

Satnav systems are sure to be popular choices for Father’s Day, so it pays to get the best one – and you can’t get better than the PC Pro recommended TomTom Go 730 or the new 740, which includes updated maps and features. This £199 GPS includes European maps and the IQ Routes system, which calculates routes from traffic speed rather than speed limits. It’s the best navigator around and, if your father is is a frequent traveller, indispensable.

Those buying on a budget, meanwhile, should try the TomTom One, which costs only £87 but offers clear, straightforward guidance at a knock-down price – ideal if your father doesn’t need the myriad extra features included with more expensive models.

Netbooks have proved hugely popular over the last 18 months, so one of these mini-laptops could be the perfect gift this Sunday. If you’re looking to splash out, Samsung models are the ones to pick: the smaller NC10 is the ideal mixture of value for money and fantastic build quality, while the NC20 is more expensive but closer to a real laptop thanks to its 12in screen and superb keyboard.

Musical parents are sure to be pleased with a new mp3 player, but make sure your gift is on-song rather than off-key. Our favourite is the £147 Cowon S9, which offers a sharp, vivid OLED screen and fantastic sound quality, turning a dull commute into a multimedia extravaganza. And, if your dad is an Apple fan, the iPod Nano is your best bet: a gorgeous and intelligent product that, at £123 for 16GB, won’t break the bank.

Audiophiles may also want some top-quality headphones to go with their new kit. If that’s the case, then your dad’ll be pleased with anything from Sennheiser, who normally provide fantastic aural experiences. If we had to pick one pair, though, we’d go for the IE8s: at £157, they cost more than the average mp3 player, but they provide the ultimate in sound quality – it doesn’t get any better than these.

And, finally, those who are a little more flush with cash may want to buy something a little more extravagant. Take a look at the Dell XPS One 24, which is one of the most stylish all-in-one PCs on the market today, or the stunning Sony VAIO VGN-Z31VN/X, which is simply the best ultraportable around, even if it does cost £1,781. And, if you’ve got a dad into gaming, the Chillblast Fusion Spitfire is our favourite pixel-pushing monster – and it’ll set you back £1,029.

No matter what technology your dad’s into, then, there’s sure to be something he’ll love: whether it’s a digital camera, satnav system, netbook or mp3 player, these products are the best in their respective classes – so, if you haven’t already, get buying while you still have time to spare.

]]> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/06/18/the-pc-pro-fathers-day-gift-guide/feed/ 2 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/05/01/the-recession-as-measured-in-digicams/ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/05/01/the-recession-as-measured-in-digicams/#comments Fri, 01 May 2009 16:15:18 +0000 David Fearon http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/?p=5503 We’ve got awfully used to technology getting cheaper by the year over the past decade. But the party’s over. I got my hands on Canon’s newest EOS DSLR camera this week, in the form of the EOS 500D (we’ll have a full review next week).

It’s a nice enough addition to the legendary DSLR range that began with the 300D in 2004, but the price is flabbergasting.

Granted, the new model has new features – HD video and a better (much better) screen – but none that justify a price hike of over 50% from the previous model. Yes that’s right – over 50%. When we reviewed the 450D at launch last year, the price with 18-55mm lens was £600. The new model is a sneeze short of a round grand, at a list price of £969.

A thousand pounds. For a camera that not even Canon will pretend is designed for professionals (or even very serious amateurs).

It’s not Canon’s fault, of course. Having recently finished writing a digital camera group test (which you’ll be able to read in the next issue of PC Pro, on the shelves around 15th May), an overriding theme was the fact that the pound sterling’s weakness (and the general state of the economy) is having a huge effect on prices across the board.

So anyway, I seem to recall some economist somewhere once saying that you could chart the progress of the economy in terms of the price of Mars bars. Apparently they track the state of fiscal play very well.

So I’ve decided to create a new economic index, designed to chart the progress of the economy in terms that techies can get to grips with.

It’s called the CameraIndex(tm), and it’s based on the price of successive models in the EOS xxxD camera line, from the groundbreaking EOS 300D in 2004 to the new EOS 500D. It’s exclusively revealed in the graph below:

Eeek. No wonder we got used to technology getting cheaper and cheaper. And even less wonder that a price hike is such a shock.

Just for fun, I thought I’d check my theory of a correlation with the wider economy, by superimposing the value of the UK’s FTSE 100 index – a fair-ish indicator of the general state of the economy – at the same points in time:

That’ll be quite a nice inverse correlation then.

If you’d like to license the use of the CameraIndex(tm), do please drop me a line. Subscription fees will be levied in f-stops (or possibly hundredths of a second – I haven’t decided yet).

What follows here is the incredible tale of the buffeting his beloved Canon EOS 350D has taken on his journey and the brilliant support he received from Canon’s worldwide support team, lifted wholesale from his superb travel blog, Sorry For The Group Email:

Here is what may be a little-known fact about cameras.

Apart from Ferraris from forecourts, champagne into ocean liners, and Edwardian furniture off buildings, very few commodities lose their value faster. A second little-known fact about DSLRs is that, despite their promisingly-mechanical nature, economically repairing them is next to impossible. Indeed, ruin a DSLR comprehensively enough (easily done), and repairing it and buying a new one take on similar fiscal proportions.

So it was that I was morose in Kuala Lumpur. My beloved 350D was dead. Even worse, it wasn’t even my fault. If I had, say, killed it trying to get a Pulitzer-winning shot of a tiger in a jungle, it would have been fine. I could have lived with it. (Just.) As it was, a murderous freak wave took it between Thailand and Malaysia. It worked now and again for about four days, but with each frame the power switch became more and more temperamental. By the time we reached Kuala Lumpur it was finished, possibly helped on its way by the repeated stress of moving between the extreme heat and humidity of outdoors, and the chilled dryness of air-conditioned shopping malls.

In desperation, we visited Canon’s EOS Pro Center in the Berjaya Times Square Mall.

There, something remarkable happened. The Canon Pro Center is a Canon franchise dedicated to selling the company’s higher-end kit. The shelves were collapsing under a few hundred thousand pounds’ worth of professional lenses, DSLR bodies and lighting equipment. You had to ring a doorbell just to get them to unlock the plate glass door. I wanted one of everything they sold, but, they apologised, they didn’t do repairs.

But, even though I wasn’t about to buy anything, or indeed, spend any money at all, the chap behind the counter went out of his way. He fiddled about for a bit and confirmed that the camera did indeed appear fine, bar the power switch. Then, he called Canon’s service centre. By the time I left I had an appointment for the next morning, a signed note from the Pro Centre explaining that I was leaving the country in two days and needed a fix as soon as possible, and even the name of an engineer to ask for.

We arrived in the morning of the next day after a 45-minute taxi journey. The Canon service centre in Kuala Lumpur is a kind of hospital for sick kit. In the hour and a half we were there we saw people wander in cradling fax machines, scanners, printers, and one chap who brought in a rucksack full of what had to be about £10,000 worth of professional photography gear. We were seen immediately by a sympathetic-looking engineer who toted my camera behind the scenes. After a few minutes he emerged: it was the power switch. We bade him fix it and he vanished again.

Half an hour later he was back. The power switch in a 350D (you’ll doubtless be fascinated to learn) sits on an electronic assembly that also comprises the shutter switch, mode dial and auto-exposure lock and focus zone buttons. He replaced the entire thing, and brought the original, knackered one out with him.

It was certainly dead. The gold contact where the power switch did its business was a lumpy, corroded mess, further mangled by my repeated attempts to get the switch to work again.

But he had fixed it. Not only that, but, sweetly, he had cleaned the body, managing to remove a few scratches on the built-in flash that I had long presumed permanent. Even better: in a world in which consumer DSLRs are commodities, the entire fix – from broken lump of plastic and optics to fully-working tool – cost about £40.

Not cheap by Asian standards, but less than a new camera. Even if I was eyeing up 40Ds only half-reluctantly.

I should point out that at some point in the misadventure the dioptre got broken, but that is splitting hairs.

What’s the damage?

Travelling – the kind with a capital ‘T’ – is unkind to cameras, yet even a low-end consumer model fares extraordinarily well. The following are a few of the things my 350D survived.

Manual “This camera is a precision instrument. Do not drop it or subject it to physical shock.”
Reality Dropped with significant bangs in Mongolia, China, and France. Bashed against countless walls, trapped in doors, and carried on to dozens of aircraft. It’s also a veteran of more than a few press conferences, in which shiny pieces of kit are routinely surrounded by fat, jostling hacks.

Manual
“This camera is not waterproof and cannot be used underwater.”
Reality
Thoroughly soaked in Thailand/Malaysia.
Snowed on in Russia.
Snowed on in Mongolia.
Rained on (torrentially) in Laos.

Manual
“If the camera is suddenly brought in from the cold into a warm room, condensation may form on the camera and internal parts.”
Reality
Every time we entered a building in Russia, Mongolia and Beijing.

Manual
“Working temperature range: 0°C – 40°C/32°F – 104°F.”
Reality
-20°C in Russia. -32°C in Mongolia. -5°C in China.
45°C in Vietnam.

This is all to say nothing of dozens (possibly hundreds) of cack-handed lens changes in idiotic locations (on boats, beaches, etc) and generally unsympathetic treatment. My camera has proved astonishingly robust, and the freak wave incident was the first time that my fears that it was badly hurt were actually realised. Even then, it limped on for a few days, producing no fewer than 340 exposures, before it gave up the ghost entirely. So, we say, “bravo” to Canon.

Earlier this year, Canon blamed none other than hapless ex-England manager Steve McClaren for costing it millions of pounds of digital camera sales. Why? Because Canon was one of the official sponsors of Euro 2008 and thanks to the umbrella man’s incompetence, fewer footy fans would stop mid-game, turn to their mate and say: “Sod this penatly shootout, I’m popping down to Dixons and picking up an Ixus” every time the Canon logo appeared on screen.

Now the Carphone Warehouse’s Charles Dunstone is blaming his company’s sliding broadband sales on the property slump. “One of the key times people change broadband provider is when they move house,” he claims in today’s Times. “If you’re not moving house, the catalyst to make you think about changing provider does not exist.”

Hmmm… I’d say the main catalyst for switching broadband provider is shocking service from an ISP. And how did Carphone’s TalkTalk rank for customer service in the most recent PC Pro Awards? A mighty two stars out of six for customer support and one for reliability.

Perhaps Mr Dunstone should be looking a little bit closer to home?

First impressions are good – it’s very light, small and pocketable, exhibits the usual solid Canon build quality, 10-megapixel resolution, a 3x zoom ISO up to 1600, face detection and an impressive-looking optical image stabiliser similar to the system seen on our A List favourite, the Canon Ixus 960 IS.

Be sure to check the Reviews section for the full lowdown – we’ll be giving it the PC Pro treatment very soon.

Here’s an early shot taken with the camera…