What camera's compare to the Ricoh Caplio R4 and would be a better buy

Need to buy compact digital camera with good zoom and good megapics. Had a Caplio R4 for 5 days and broke the LCD screen. Need to replace this camera asap. What will be a better or good buy

Hi Deon,

The only camera I can think of that comes close to matching the R4's feature set is the Panasonic TZ1, but it is different in several key respects. To begin with, its max wide angle is 35mm, compared to the R4's 28mm. This means it will not be able to capture landscapes/crowd shots in quite the same way. Second, it has 1MP less of resolution (5MP to the R4's 6MP), but this won't make much of a difference except when printing poster-sized images (and how often do you do that?). It does, however, have a 10x optical zoom, which is quite a bit longer than the R4's 7x. To fit that 10x lens, the body is a bit bigger than the R4's, but it's still a very small camera. You can see a direct comparison of the cameras' vital stats here.

Hope this helps!

Thanks. Still a bit hesitant. Would you say it better to buy the new Caplio R6 or still go gor the Panasonic TZ1.

Ben,
Agreed I did not explain my needs. What I need is a fast, compact, wide(28mm) lenced camera with at least 7x optical zoom with a minimum of 6 meg pics. I mainly use the computer but do have the need to print a series of photo's to make landscape frames etc.
The caplio R4 worked for me as it was fast wide lenced and pick quality not bad. The use of a camera in my work has become a big thing and i still need a lot of experience before i will be able to make the right choice with camera's. It will be great if I could use your experience to help with this

Well, with those specs the Caplio series is really the only option. If you drop the 28mm requirement, another option is the Kodak V610. It's got a unique (well, unique to Kodak, anyway) design that involves two different lenses (and two different CCDs), one for telephoto (10x) and one for wide(r) angle shooting. It's very, very small and pretty stylish, but reviews regarding its image quality and performance are pretty sketchy, particularly complaining about slow zoom response and so-so overall images.

It seems to me that you're probably best sticking with the Ricohs, particularly if you liked your R4 for the short time you had it. With the R6 coming out soon, the R5s will probably be dropping in price and it might be a good time to pick one up. Sorry I couldn't offer more suggestions, but the field of high zoom, wide angle ultracompacts is pretty slim.

Good luck!

Thanks Ben believe me all your inputs helped me a lot

Panasonic have just announced a TZ2 and TZ3 both with 28-280 zooms. The difference between the models being pixel count and screen size.