My wife is hard on cameras. In the past three years she has destroyed (i.e., physically damaged) two FZ model Panasonics and a pair of Olympus Stylus. Well, in fairness, the second Stylus did fail electronically (LCD screen no longer turns on)...

She wants a small, shirt-pocket-sized camera. She only shoots in full Auto mode, and recognizes just two controls: the power button and the shutter release. The only "fancy" setup I have done on her last two cameras was to force fill-flash for all shots.

I do not want to spend a lot of money (~$150, new or used), but would like something in a 7-10x (or more) zoom range. The fewer megapixels the better (cramming 12 or 14 MP into an inexpensive pocket-size camera is just a recipe for noise.)

While image quality is important, ruggedness, convenience, simplicity, and zoom range are of higher priority.

Suggestions?

tanstaafl.

What type of Stylus? I have a Stylus that was pretty good until I blew out the seals when I took it down a big 3-story waterslide. Mostly I used it for whitewater kayaking. The year after I bought mine, they changed the name of that group of cameras to the Olympus Tough, and kept the Stylus brand for the non-waterproof/shockproof/etc line. They have the Tough TG-320 (listed for $130), and the Tough TG-310 (listed for $180). My only real beef with the camera was lack of manual mode, which isn't going to be a concern for your wife.

I should add, most of the major makers now have a "rugged" camera. Most, IIRC, are in the $300+ range, and, until the 2011/2012 models (with the exception of the Olympus products), I wouldn't consider them "shirt-pocket" cameras.

The Fuji Finepix WP range is pretty good. I got this one for my wife: http://www.c2uoffice.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=379&products_id=157263 and it takes good shots underwater, up mountains, at parties etc., and is cheap enough that she doesn't really worry about it.

Minor configuration options (such as landscape, party, night-time, sport etc if you want to use them) but she keeps it on auto with auto-fill on the flash and it's pretty good all round.

Stylus 1010. Compact, 7x optical zoom, 10 megapixel.

I've looked at the "Tough" series , but they are all non-starters because of the limited (3.6x) zoom.

There seem to be plenty of the old Stylus 1010 cameras for sale, new and used, but she seems to use those up pretty quickly. Perhaps, though, I am being unfair. She killed the first one by dropping it four feet onto a tile floor, where it landed lens first. Even before she dropped it that camera looked like it had been through the wars... and lost. The second one died of electronic failure for no good reason. She was taking [terrible] pictures through the window of a moving car, and from one picture to the next the LCD just went away.

Interestingly, the LCD works and displays the menu options if I connect the USB cable to the camera to download pictures. There just seems to be no connection between the LCD and the actual photographic apparatus of the camera. Maybe I could bend a paperclip into a small rectangle and glue it to the top of the camera and she could use that as an optical viewfinder. My last desperate hope is to pull the battery out of the camera for a day and let it go completely dead (there is a capacitor or something that preserves basic time/date and most recent user settings) in the hopes that it will reboot the electronics and bring the LCD screen back to life.

I'm not putting too much faith in that.

tanstaafl.

Like the Olympus "Tough" series, the limited zoom range is a deal-killer.

Really, all I want is a pocket size camera with a 1.5" sensor of 36 megapixels, a 24-960mm [equivalent] zoom range, a real viewfinder, optical image stabilization, aperture range of f1.2 to f22, full manual control of shutter and aperture, with no perceptible noise up to ISO 3200. Oh, and in the $150 price range.

What's so hard about that?

tanstaafl.

The dpreview.com camera search shows only a few cameras with pixel counts of less than 11Mp and telephoto equivalents of 200mm or longer.

Narrowing it down from there on price and ruggedness shouldn't be too difficult.

That said, most rugged cameras are also built to be waterproof, which is going to limit your zoom capabilities significantly, since a telescoping lens housing is going to be very hard to waterproof, and I imagine no one is even going to bother to try.

I think maybe this one.

tanstaafl.

Looking through DPReview I came across this sample photo, don't remember what camera or anything... but was curious as to what make/model the airplane was.

Anybody know?

tanstaafl.

Wow, that one's got me stumped. First reaction was P-38, but the engines are wrong. The engines look kinda like Corsair engines. I'm not sure the US did many twin-engine fighters besides the P-38, but that's what this looks like, a twin-engine fighter.

Hm, it's a carrier-based navy plane, judging from the markings and folded wingtips. Hm... still searching...

Nice!

The towbar on the front kind of surprised me, since I assumed catapult assisted launches were more recent than WWII (I did know they were used in Vietnam). Turns out carriers were using catapults since 1912. I guess you learn something new every day.

I knew that steam catapults were post-WWII, but I didn't know about the compressed-air ones in 1912. I figure they were useful for short take-off, but obsoleted by full-sized carrier decks until the advent of heavier jet planes.

What's funny is, that's local to me, just up the highway, and I didn't know about that particular collection. Most of the attention in Seattle is for the museum at Boeing field.

So many WW2 fighters were taildraggers - a bit difficult to launch by catapult.

Paul Allen (I think that is who it is - the Microsoft guy) had a collection that puts the Museum of Flight to shame (I guess that really depends on what your interest is, Paul's is vintage combat aircraft). Museum of Flight gets the attention because of it's relationship to Boeing, but Paul's collection is incredible.

Paul's a bit of a local legend here, for the stuff he collects and the various things he invests in around town. I find it amusing that you say his interest is vintage aircraft, like that was his only hobby. His hobbies and interests dot the landscape around here. :-)

Oh, I meant that museum collection is vintage combat aircraft, since the Museum of Flight is a lot more commercial stuff.

No, definitely this one, the Panasonic ZS-15, available on Amazon.com for ~$200.

Interestingly, the upscale ZS-20 has fancier features that are useless to me: GPS, 60 fps non-interlaced stereo HD video (as opposed to 60 fps interlaced mono HD video) and 20x optical zoom as opposed to 16x. Yet, the "lesser" ZS-15 has a better sensor, much better image quality and low-light capability (as a result of the 12MP sensor as opposed to the ZS-20's 14MP) and costs about $100 less.

Read the review linked above. The ZS-15 has a fantastic feature set, and the reviewer was quite impressed with it. It took a few hours and a lot of winnowing, but I think I found the best choice. For SWMBO, anyway. YMMV.

tanstaafl.