Instead of those I would get the 3000mAh ones. specially for digicam use.

 

3000mAh may be overkill for some cameras.

 

if you use the flash 10% of the time, it will be well worth it.

 

Back in my pro/amateur photographer days I shot a wedding or two (only for my cheap relatives) and I carried a Quantum external battery pack for all the flash photos that a wedding requires. So for someone that is going to be using flash a bunch, you can never have enough powAr.

Anyway, since taking snowboard shots was mentioned, you definitely need to look at long lenses, high shutter speeds, and yes, burst mode. Sports are pretty easy to shoot with the right equipment, but the right equipment is really expensive. It also tends to be rather bulky. Taking a video and then pulling frames out of it most definitely ain't gonna cut it. For snowboard shots, you want to have a spot meter so you can meter for the person and not the vast whiteness which is surrounding them.

In my experience with snowboard photography, a 28-105 mm zoom works well if you're say at or near the bottom of a jump and catching people flying up above you. But to get less "whoa he's flying over me" angles or to take pictures of pipes and such you're usually farther away and thus need a longer lens. Another thing you want for snowboard shots is a polarizing filter to put on the front of the lens. Polarizing filters screw onto the front of lenses and basically make the sky look more blue than what's normally going into the camera. With a snowboard shot your non-sky elements are all white which doesn't provide a lot of contrast and therefor doesn't give you a blue sky.

To truly do all this stuff well, you'd pretty much need an SLR. A manual one and a deft touch would work, and automatic ones make sports photography ridiculously easy. But that'd be out of your price range especially when it comes to digital. So on to the choices of point-n-shoots.

The Canon A95 has an equivalent 38-114 mm lens. So you'd be stuck with standing at the base of a jump. It also, as far as I know, doesn't have any way to mount a filter on the front of the lens. It's a really nice camera overall but it would not be my first choice for snowboard shots.

That Kyocera M410R you mentioned actually would be a pretty good choice with its burst mode. Cnet says it's not as impressive as claimed but still better than most digital point-n-shoots. The big thing is its lens which has a nice range of equivalent 37-370 mm, and it also can take a polarizing filter on the front of the lens. The wide angle is perhaps a bit lacking if you're way up close under a smaller jump, but the tele end is really good for shots taken from farther away. It also has a (relatively) high top shutter speed of 1/2000 sec.

I don't know of any other cameras in your price range which provide the frame rate, long lens and filter capability. There are plenty of more expensive ones which do, but well, they're more expensive.

 

I think the majority of my shooting will be from close up, but I haven't done much snowboarding photography before, so we'll see how it actually works out... considering the type of riding we do, I imagine most of the shots will be a laying on the ground shooting overhead/down the mountain sorta thing.

Yeah, I read about the kyocera's burst (3.3 fps), which is what made me interested. As you can probably imagine, I'd like something that works, but these just cannot be profesional-grade photo's on my budget.

 

There is always going to be shutter lag with digicams. Specially with the point and shoot cameras that you are looking at. I dont know about the newer cameras, but with my old Olympus c4000, the auto focus time + shutter lag is HORRIBLE. You should buy your camera at Circuit City. From what I know, they still have a no hassle 2 week 100% return policy. Buy a camera, play with it, return it if you dont like it. There is no better way to see if that camera is for you.

 

From the CNet review of the M410R:

We were modestly impressed with the Kyocera Finecam M410R's responsiveness but not as bowled over as we had hoped, given Kyocera's bold claims about its RTune technology. On power-up, the camera's display makes it appear ready to shoot in a quick 1 second or so, but we could not actually get a first shot off in less than 3.6 seconds. That's reasonably good for a megazoom model but not earth-shaking. We measured shutter delay with autofocus at 0.8 second, also good but not class-leading. Likewise, shot-to-shot time is about 2.5 seconds with image review off (4.6 seconds with review on), which is again acceptable but not notably impressive. With flash, the M410R's shot-to-shot time extends to 8.6 seconds. The nonflash shot-to-shot numbers are puzzling because, in continuous-shooting mode, the camera can indeed capture 3.3fps without pausing or slowing until your SD card is full. That is impressive.

Though we found the Finecam M410R's autofocus speed to be lackluster--thus, the decent-but-not-great shutter-delay time--the camera did do an unusually good job of follow-focusing moving subjects while maintaining 2fps in continuous shooting. The lens zooms relatively quietly and smoothly, but its zoom position is hard to control precisely, which can lead to framing frustrations.

The important part is in bold. Given this description, for action shots I would say the best approach would be to put it in whatever Kyocera calls subject-tracking AF and continuous shooting mode. You follow the rider down a jump with the shutter released pressed halfway (this keeps the AF tracking the subject) and as the rider starts to do something interesting hit it all the way for a burst of a few pictures.

Plus the ability to use a polarizing filter is also a big deal. This link explains in detail how they work with digital cameras. If you look at the sample images the various digital-domain tricks to get a polarizer effect work reasonably well, but the last image which is taken with an actual polarizer looks the best. For winter shots a polarizer is especially important.

Oh, and just in case ya don't know, a filter is just a piece of glass which screws in front of the lens. But of course, you need to have threads on the lens for the filter to attatch.

 

thats true, I hadn't considered filters. I'll likely be using more than just the polarizer as I play more...

 

I would say start looking at the Canon G series. G5 and G6 but they cost more and are bulkier than the A series.

 

reviving the thread, I think I'd like to decide today.

The cannon G is definitely out of my price range, and compactness is important.