some user advices another on a forum [
link]
Short advice:
But anyways, get the canon A80, it is a revolutionary camera that leads its class... Forget nikons, most of their consumer camera lack tolerance for low lighting situations yielding soft, noise pictures and at times because of autofocus problems, images can be blurry too.
Indepth advice:
History: I have been a nikon fan since 1999, I have owned the 880, 990 and 4500. Starting with the 880, 950, 990, 4500, 5700, 5400 and everything in between Nikons all suffer from the same disease, read the reviews and learn, they lack tolerance for low light situation, and that can be very trouble some.
Because of their low light intolerance, consumer nikons can fail at even something as simple as being able to focus on the person in front of you accross the table at a restaurant dinner under mood lighting. Never mind running after hyper kids to get a snap shots. All that nikons have going for them is a powerful macro...
I was at the same situation that you are in about a week ego, when I was researching the A70 and at one point cosidered the nikon 3100. But my findings were that the 3100 only produce good noise-free images when you use the scene modes, anything other than that will produce noisy images. The camera is a truely handicap point and shoot, it doesn't provide much manual featues. Also it looks like a little ball so being ackward to hold and carry, good luck finding a nice bag for it that would fit nice.
Both camera A70/3100 or A80/4300 being priced the same, I would not hesitate to choose canon over nikon in this particular situation.
From my perspective I have always been shy of canon consumer digital cameras and stayed away from it, first because they have always been known to struggle a bit with their auto focus not being too reliable, second I hated the color tone of older canon digital cameras. I always found it too yellowish, almost like car antifrezze color...
Pros of the A80:
But the Canon A80 is something else... If you are looking for something to carry around and trow it everywhere then the A70 has that feel, more of a point and shoot and of a camera that you really done care about, just trow it everywhere...
Now, the A80 has a different feel, it has metal on it, it feels heavy, and build with quality, something that you want to protect and preserve. In short the camera is very fast, it zooms really fast, it takes picture very fast with minimal lag, and it saves to memory very fast, so operating it in general is very quick so you won't be missing to many good shots due to camera delay. Second, it handles very well at indoors situation, so do take it to that restaurant dinner, it will focus and it will take decent images.
Image quality to me is superb, very smooth tones, not oversaturated colors and good detail.
Excellent battery quality, I hardly use the view finder, and so fart I have been taking about 40 shots everyday for the past 4 days and still running good.
It has an excellent optical viewfinder, that is why I hardly use the LCD, something I never did with my Olympus 3030z becuse the optical viewfinder was so ackward.
It is actually smaller that what it looks like, I find it very easy to put it on my jacket pocket and to hide.
Excellent manual feature and memory of the settings. Full automatic mode is the only mode that doesn't remember anything if you turn off the camera off/on. But every other mode stay the way you set it after off/on.
Flash is good and I don't find the warm yellowish I used to see on older canon, on the contrary the A80 can sometimes be a little on the cool side which I don't mind and like.
Check my oldinary joe gallery, which will give you normal daily sample snap shots that normal people would produce with this camera.
http://cloud.prohosting.com/~poder2k/canon/
