My Sony DSC-U50 was just stolen by one of my wife's students. What I really loved about the thing was that it had a flip screen. I was able to frame shots even when the camera was held over my head or close to the ground. Some of the pictures I've grabbed that way are great. Because my son is only 1 year old, I was able to shoot pictures from "his perspective" and while in a crowd, I was able to hold the camera up high and still get my shot.

So... the U50 isn't made anymore and $300 on eBay seems like a lot for a camera that doesn't have a zoom and is only 2.0 mega pixels. It appears that Sony doesn't make the line of "U" CyberShot cameras anymore and the closest thing I could find was the Sony DSC-M2. It's cool, but it gets mixed reviews based on ergonomics, prices and features. I guess the price (400) should get you a lot more camera for the money.

Basically, what I need is a simple point-and-shoot camera that has a flip screen... do you guys know of any or recommend any?

(Small size is a plus).

There's a zillion of them -- with fold-out and tilt/rotate screens. Seems to be a mid/upper market feature these days, though. The Canon-G[23456] all have it, and so do others.

The original Nikon Coolpix series had twistable split bodies for a similar effect -- I've still got my E990 Coolpix. And somebody else just recently put out a split-body camera, read about it on Dpreview not long ago.

Cheers

Canon A620 looks very nice with 4x optical zoom and 7.1MP. 2" flip out and rotating LCD. http://www.steves-digicams.com/2005_reviews/a620.html

Nikon has the Coolpix S4 with 10x optical zoom and 6MP. 2.5" LCD with swivel body (no optical viewfinder on this model). It's also tiny. http://www.steves-digicams.com/2005_reviews/s4.html

Those would likely be my picks for swivel functionality in and around that price point and size.

Bruno

Thank you so much! I had done a search on "digital camera lcd flip" and only came up with one Canon model (the A95 I think?) I never knew that "split body" was even a style of camera until you guys mentioned it! THAT's what I'm looking for! Knowing that you still have and use your E990 CoolPix makes me believe it's a good camera. dpreview is now bookmarked as well.

Thanks to you too Bruno. The Coolpix seems to be exactly what I'm looking for! The price is great, the LCD is about 5 times the size of my Sony's, it has 10x the zoom the Sony had, uses SD media and has a lot more than the 2.0 megapixels I had!

After I read a few more reviews, this may be the one!

(As I mentioned, my camera was stolen... what burns me up more than anything is that my wife only has 2 days left in the school year and the student still hasn't had the decency to return the memory card of the camera. She had begged and pleaded with the students because the camera still had pictures from our son's 1st birthday party on it... I can't explain how irrate I am.)

I'll put in a good word for the Canon G6, just to confuse things. I only owned one for a week, but it was a real nice little camera. Compact Flash is the cheapest/best card type, it supports Canon RAW, and it uses the same DSLR/camcorder batteries that last for ever and cost about $8 on ebay. (I think the dpreview test got well over 500 shots on one battery, and their battery benchmark involves power cycling and using the flash a good percentage of the time) It's super macro mode was impressive too, attached is an resized example without any cropping.

It's not the newest camera these days, and it's not the cheapest, but if I was in the market for a P&S camera with or without a flip out screen, it'd be near the top of my list.

Matthew

Yeah, I absolutely love the Coolpix E990 here. My best photos were taken with it, despite far "better" cameras (Canon D60/20D) since then. The split body beats the pull-out tilt/swivel LCDs of more "modern" models for ease of use and all around convenience..

The latest Coolpix with the 10X optical zoon (and huge LCD!) looks sweet, but I'd still go with the 4500 if I could get one, because of the extreme macro capability that it shares with its predecessors (E990!).

Cheers