Top Five Digital Cameras for the New Graduate
With commencement speeches abounding, it's time once again to think about what to get for your favorite new graduate. At the top of many lists (just below Dr. Seuss' "Oh, the Places You'll Go!") is a new digital camera. What recent graduates wouldn't want a flashy new gadget to document the new journey on which they are about to embark? So, herewith, are some of my top picks for the various grads in your life:
The Graduate Student
As the unemployment rate increases, so do graduate-school admissions, so there's a good chance your favorite graduate is about to become a graduate student. Unless they're headed off to study visual arts or something, busy grad-school students that are hitting the books won't have the time or inclination to figure out a complex camera (or pore over a manual), so a simple but robust point-and-shoot is a good option. Though it's over a year old (which is middle-aged in digital camera years), I still like the Canon PowerShot SD880 IS as a solid, compact point-and-shoot option that offers a nice wide-angle lens. The camera's successor, the PowerShot SD960 IS, just came out in March, so you can probably get a pretty good deal on the SD880 IS.
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The Peace Corps Volunteer
For graduates seeking a more philanthropic way to delay the job search, volunteering in third-world countries can be a great way to develop skills--and often provides a wealth of photographic opportunities as well. The volunteer lifestyle can be rough and rustic, and as such, demands a camera that can withstand the elements, like the Olympus Stylus Tough-6000. The Stylus Tough-6000 is waterproof to 10 feet, shockproof to a 5-foot drop, and freeze proof to 14°F, so it can handle itself in adverse conditions, and its special tap-initiated controls let you operate various camera functions by tapping the top, back, and sides of the camera, making it easy to operate when regular buttons are difficult to access (e.g., when you're wearing gloves).
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The Globe-trekking Backpacker
With more than a touch of the wanderlust myself, I can relate to this graduate well. Though I've left the world of Eurail passes and hostel-hopping behind, I know that it's important to pack light when you have to carry everything on your back, but with the world your photographic oyster, you want a flexible and feature-rich camera as well. For this graduate I recommend my current favorite compact megazoom, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3. Panasonic packs a 25-300mm-equivalent 12x zoom lens, a beautiful 3-inch LCD, and AVCHD Lite HD video-shooting capabilities into a very pocketable format, to make one of the easiest to use and most flexible point-and-shoots I've seen in a long while.
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The Cubicle-bound Office Worker
Back when I graduated college (longer ago than I care to say), most of my fellow Manhattan-bound graduates fell into this category. While office life is pretty different these days (with the water cooler replaced by Twitter, Facebook, and the like), happy hour, weekend carousing, and face-to-face socializing still lives on (or as far as I can tell from everyone's Facebook photos and Flickr feeds). So, I recommend an ultra-compact point-and-shoot for this recent graduate--one that can slip easily into a pocket or purse for after-work snapshots. The Nikon Coolpix S230 is a stylish ultracompact with all the bells and whistles you need to get great shots of friends with its "Smart Portrait" system, which includes smile, blink, and face-detection.
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The Photography Buff
I can't finish off this list without offering up at least one entry-level dSLR, which can replace any of the aforementioned cameras for any of the aforementioned graduates if they have any interest in taking their photography to the next level. I don't always recommend the latest and greatest, since you can often get better deals without sacrificing much by going with slightly older models, but this year's crop of entry level dSLRs have really upped the ante. My favorite of the bunch is the Canon EOS Rebel T1i, which bests the close runner-up Nikon D5000, in my opinion, with its better HD video capture (720p at 30fps or 1080p at 20fps), greater color depth, and its bigger and higher-resolution LCD (though the Nikon's articulated LCD does offer more shooting flexibility).