Best Cameras For Students | Digital Camera HQ's Holiday Buyer's Guide

Choosing a camera for the high school or college student in your life can be a daunting task. It helps to know when and why they'll use the camera. Most likely, it's either because they want to capture the good times they share with their friends or they want to explore their creative side through photography. The options below are solid starting points for either case.

Sleek, Simple Point-and-Shoot Canon SD1200 IS from $179.00	Form, functionality, and a sweet price point all converge at the Canon Powershot SD1200 IS. It's possibly the most popular camera on the market right now, and has been consistently ranked as one of the best ultra-compact cameras since its release in April. The features are typical for a camera in this class, at 10 megapixels and 3x optical zoom, but the interface is refreshingly slick. It's a simple, reliable camera, perfect for a student to fit in a pocket or purse, bring along for a day at the park or a night out, and post the results to Facebook in minutes.
Lots of Style, HD Video Sony W290 from $195.95	[Read our full Sony Cybershot W290 Review] The Sony Cybershot W290 packs above-average features into a compact, stylish body. It includes a 12 megapixel sensor, 5x optical zoom, and a 28mm wide-angle lens, resulting in superior photo quality over many ultra-compacts. Perhaps most impressively, it records 720p HD video. The button interface is somewhat cramped, but the "intelligent auto" function makes this a relatively hands-off camera, easily adjusting its settings for any environment (even at a party). Available in black, dark blue, silver, and bronze.
Great First dSLR Nikon D3000 from $485.71	The Nikon D3000 is for the student who has studied hard, earned good grades, and taken up photography as a hobby. It's an entry-level digital single lens reflex (dSLR) camera, a little cousin to those that the pros use. An ultra-compact it is not, but this update of the wildly successful D40 and D60 offers superb manual focus controls, quick shutter response, a 10.2 megapixel sensor, and a vivid 3-inch LCD display. The price tag is in the $500 range, but worth the money for the purposes of a young, amateur photographer ready to step up from a point-and shoot camera to something more advanced.