Top Rated Digital Cameras

Quick! Name Me The Top Rated Digital Cameras!

Digital cameras are getting cheaper and cheaper, and at the same time, they're getting better and better. When you consider this, you might think you could walk into the nearest camera shop, grab the cheapest thing you can find, and walk out happy... To an extent, that's kind of true if you're a real shutterbug. Every single camera in the world is, at the very least, fun to play around with.

Best of the Best

But if you're buying a camera with sense of purpose in mind, you'll want to do a bit of research beforehand. The cameras we're about to list below are generally considered to be amongst the very best in their own categories, and generally tend to score an average of four to five out of five stars on most user review sites.

But okay, enough jibber jabber, let's just get straight to the best digital camera reviews...

Best budget camera
If you need a good, quality camera, and you don't have a ton of money to throw away, the Fujifilm FinePix F50fd may well be your best bet. In the hands of a knowledgeable photog, it's not difficult at all to get professional quality results out of this little compact unit. It works as a perfect point-and-shoot camera, but it also allows enough user control to get you exactly the results you're looking for. The camera features image stabilization, face detection, shutter priority exposure controls, and an impressive 12 megapixels for image resolution. The only major problem is that it can be a little sluggish between shots, but if you look at what the camera can do well, it's basically a four hundred dollar camera for just one hundred and fifty bucks.

Best video camera
If you want the absolute best mini-DV camcorder around, you're looking for the Canon XL2. You get 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios, 60i, 24p, and 30p frame rates, image stabilization, gamma control, and an open design. You can attach new lenses (a feature strangely absent in most consumer DV cameras), and you can use wireless microphones. This is a consumer grade camera so good, it has actually been used in a number of mainstream films. It is considered outdated, and the Canon XL-H1 is a bit sleeker with a slightly more powerful zoom lens, but the Canon XL2 may be the better choice simply because, being four years old, it's a heck of a lot cheaper than the XL-H1, while delivering pretty much the same results. Still a bit pricy, though, sitting between one and two thousand dollars used, so hobbyists may want to opt this one out.

Best camera overall
Okay, if you just want the best digital camera you can get (and preferably, without having to take out a second mortgage), you're going to want to look into SLR cameras. SLR cameras used to be quite pricy, easily sitting in the two thousand dollar range at the cheapest. Today, five or six hundred dollars is easily enough to get you an SLR digital camera that can get you top grade results. You probably want to be looking into the Canon Rebel XS.

If you've got a thousand bucks to spend, you can go for the Nikon D80, but the Canon Rebel XS gives you more or less the same results for somewhere in the area of five hundred fifty dollars. You get ten point ten megapixels, a powerful zoom lens, a nice 2.5 inch screen, easy interface, auto and manual focus and exposure, basically everything you could possibly want from a digital camera. There are fancier cameras on the market, but the Rebel XS is neck and neck with the pricier models when it comes to user reviews and overall Top Rated Digital Cameras.