The problem with your request as I see it, Andy, is that all the
digis I see at the low price end are push-here-dummy cameras. This
is simply a result of the direction that camera marketing has taken
in the last 10 years. In film cameras the disposable now completely
dominates the market. In the digi market the point-and-shoot
dominates. The consumer snapshooter wants to get some pictures, not
fuss with changing lenses and selecting exposure times and apertures.
And this person is willing to expend more than a couple hundred bucks
only for some hyped feature like more megapixels, when most of them
can't even figure out how to get pictures printed from their cameras.
Many of them can't even figure out how to plug in their connector
cords and open the picture program so they can download their
pictures into their computers. Most of them don't even realize that
they can download and erase their storage cards and reuse them. They
keep buying more cards, instead.
So finding an off-the-shelf digi in that price range that gives one
any control at all except to zoom seems extremely unlikely to me.
Worse than that, if you do find one, it won't be on the shelf for
long. Within six months it will have been displaced by the next
model with more megapixels.
So I'd suggest that you recommend looking on eBay for a small
collection of D1s (Nikon) and whatever the original Canon digital
semi-pro or pro model was two years ago, and gather them together for
your teacher's project. Not only will these used first generation
pro and semi-pro digis be better built and last longer, but they may
also be reparable a couple of years from now. And maintenance can be
done on them as well.
All those cheap digis are disposable in both the sense that you can
pitch them when they don't work anymore (because they're so cheap)
and also in the sense that they're going to be superceeded by some
bigger megapixel version in a few months.
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@cape.com
508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races, press photography
http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf
