Camera for racing events

SexyGreyFox · 17 Jan 2006 at 18:36

My mates son attends car racing events and he wants a camera that will take pictures that will give excellent prints at A4. He will need a good zoom and to be able to take several pictures very quickly so he can choose one from a batch of eg a car going round a corner. He doesn't want the camera being too bulky either.

Any suggestions?

Joe T · 17 Jan 2006 at 18:43

Budget?

SexyGreyFox · 17 Jan 2006 at 19:24

Joe T said:
Budget?

?? Never asked.
Lets say £250 but suggest up to £500.

Joe T · 17 Jan 2006 at 19:54

For £250 the Panasoinc FZ20 is good buy. I can show you galleries of motor racing pics taken with that.

Other good high-end compact cameras that are worth considering include:

Olympus SP-500
Sony H1
Fuij s7000
Fuiji s5600 - newer camera than above
Canon S2 IS

For more money, a Nikon D50 with Sigma 70-300 APO lens would be good, but thats nearly £600. A DSLR such as this cant really be beaten. I also have galleries of motor racing shots taken with a D70 (next one up) and the Sigma lens above.

SexyGreyFox · 17 Jan 2006 at 20:05

Can you give links to your libraries please other than the one below your sig (unless thats it).

Joe T · 17 Jan 2006 at 20:14

dmpoole said:
Can you give links to your libraries please other than the one below your sig (unless thats it).

SexyGreyFox · 17 Jan 2006 at 20:31

Superb - thats exactly what he's after.

Joe T · 17 Jan 2006 at 20:37

No problem mate.

Deleted member 11679 · 17 Jan 2006 at 23:27

Just to throw my hat into the ring if I may. I had the Fuji S5500 all throughout the past year and it was a great learning camera for me. Its newer model, the S5600 from what I can tell is every bit as good and obviously carries more features because it is newer.

All the best photo's I took from the past year are here www.meangasoline.co.uk (except for Silverstone testing in Febuary which was done on a shocking camera)

And here is a taster image, pretty much unedited from the camera:

*Pimping over*

SexyGreyFox · 18 Jan 2006 at 06:59

Suggestions so far are excellent but another question for him.

I know most camcorders will only capture at 1 megapixel but it would be good if he captured the race then he could pull whatever picture from it and blow it up to A4.

Is there a camcorder that will do this so that he's got the best of both worlds?

TomWilko - what did you record your videos with?

divine` · 18 Jan 2006 at 07:49

Trying to pull frames from a video I would imagine would produce horrible results, mainly due to the way video works. A video is generally made up of lot of blurred stills, as opposed to sharp ones. You would also lose the motion blur effects TomWilko got.

Deleted member 11679 · 18 Jan 2006 at 11:59

dmpoole said:
Suggestions so far are excellent but another question for him.

I know most camcorders will only capture at 1 megapixel but it would be good if he captured the race then he could pull whatever picture from it and blow it up to A4.

Is there a camcorder that will do this so that he's got the best of both worlds?

TomWilko - what did you record your videos with?

Videos on the web-site are all recorded with the Fuji S5500 as well. Please note though that these are heavily compressed into WMA format and thus the quality is not that great. Actually video quality output from the S5500 was amazing, especially because you can use the optical zoom as well. 640 x 480 resolution and files are approximately 1mb/sec of filming.

Camera for racing events

Deleted member 11679

Deleted member 11679

Deleted member 11679

Deleted member 11679