Digital Trends

There’s something nice about walking around with a big bankroll in your pocket or having high credit-card limits, knowing you can buy just about anything that comes your way. Nice. The same holds true when you’re packing digicams like the S8100fd, an 18x mega zoom camera with an attractive focal length of 27-486mm. Compare this to the much more typical 35-105mm and you’ll immediately see that you can capture wide-angle portrait and landscapes then zoom all the way in to snap birds resting on the top branches of tall trees. And this is much more flexible than almost any interchangeable D-SLR lens—plus you don’t have to hassle with lugging around additional glass. Of course there are some major trade-offs between this 10-megapixel point-and-shoot and any 10MP D-SLR such as the Sony DSLR-A200 or new Nikon D60 besides several hundred dollars and overall image quality. Speed is one of the biggest—speed meaning the time it takes saving images to the card and burst mode—which is almost creaky compared to a D-SLR. That said the new S8100fd costs less than $400 USD and it just might be a perfect camera to take on your next vacation. Let’s see if it’s worth the dent in your bankroll…