Fold Out Flash Bridge Camera SZ350 £99.99 @ Aldi

This is expensive for an own brand bridge camera. Note this is not to be confused with the more expensive SLR cameras

This is ludicrous. This site simply upvotes Aldi and Lidl offers without even checking! Like the Camera earlier - the SJ4000 is just as good but slap Aldi on the end, add an extra £30 on and you get instant heat.

Argos have the Fujifilm FinePix S4800 16MP 30x Zoom Bridge Camera at £89.99 which has a good track record.
argos.co.uk/sta…htm?

pasheast

Argos have the Fujifilm FinePix S4800 16MP 30x Zoom Bridge Camera at … Argos have the Fujifilm FinePix S4800 16MP 30x Zoom Bridge Camera at £89.99 which has a good track record.http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/2133755.htm?Read lessRead more

4 AA batterys.no thanks.

rather buy a canon

tomwatts

This is ludicrous. This site simply upvotes Aldi and Lidl offers without … This is ludicrous. This site simply upvotes Aldi and Lidl offers without even checking! Like the Camera earlier - the SJ4000 is just as good but slap Aldi on the end, add an extra £30 on and you get instant heat.Read lessRead more

which was that? the only sj4000 I know is a gopro alternative.

Besides, it can't be that ludicrous, the deals at -3 !

Horses98

rather buy a canon

yes the sx510hs is £129.99 at the moment from Argos...

tapi

which was that? the only sj4000 I know is a gopro alternative.Besides, it … which was that? the only sj4000 I know is a gopro alternative.Besides, it can't be that ludicrous, the deals at -3 !Read lessRead more

It was an action camera for £80 that had absolutely no advantages over an sj4000, and very few reviews (of a different cam from.the same company) showing pq

ah sorry - I misunderstood - thought you were comparing the sj4000 to this

We bought a really good Pentax bridge camera on eBay from Argos outlet for £75 a few weeks back. I had been looking for ages when I spotted the one I got.

Nikon coolpix L830 bridge £109.99 at Argos trusted brand and only £10 extra and maybe a chance to get £10 voucher back if it's still on. Aldi are having a laugh with the price of its own brand products you would have to be a moron to buy this. My guess is Aldi are hoping that people think this is a digital SLR this firm is the worst of all supermarkets probably why profits are up on their so called low margins. Bull

bro1973

4 AA batterys.no thanks.

a benefit for some people

jase99

Nikon coolpix L830 bridge £109.99 at Argos trusted brand and only £10 e … Nikon coolpix L830 bridge £109.99 at Argos trusted brand and only £10 extra and maybe a chance to get £10 voucher back if it's still on. Aldi are having a laugh with the price of its own brand products you would have to be a moron to buy this. My guess is Aldi are hoping that people think this is a digital SLR this firm is the worst of all supermarkets probably why profits are up on their so called low margins. BullRead lessRead more

medion, maginon, crane and the other 'own brand' stuff is usually fairly good, not top end obviously, but good. offering a 3yr warranty on most of their electronics is unusual for a supermarket and better than the known brands, it's also a good warranty as the few people i've known need to use it have had quick responses with no niggles and quick turnarounds.

as for the camera, you guess Aldi are hoping people mistake it for a DSLR - why? almost all bridge cameras are built to the same format so by that token, all the mfrs are trying to confuse the customer. They clearly state it's a bridge camera and there's no apparent attempt to pretend otherwise (or like some far east brands calling it a kanon or nickon).

I can't state the actual performance of this item, i haven't seen it, but i wouldn't be surprised if it were worth the just below market asking price. Like you, I'd probably tend toward the nikon, but not dismissing this out of hand and, for whatever reason, calling the integrity of the seller into question. There are few reviews around, as not widely available, but take last year's Nov deal as a guide, gadgetspeak.com/gad…tml and it doesn't seem to be a particularly bad option.

A cousin got one of these from Aldi in Germany, and its got horrible picture quality. Tried to give it back and they had none of it. Stuck with a useless cam.

sz350, can't seem to push home the cable into the camera so no charging, any help welcome.

I've just bought one of these, having previously used a Panasonic LUMIX FZ27 ...this camera is so similar to use but with a better zoom and a faster sensor at 20mp. I am very pleased with this camera, a super replacement to my Panasonic. It handles nicely, has a nice shutter sound to it and not a clonk sound! The menu is easy to use and it copes with low light levels well. There's plenty of menu options, S, A, P plus, panoramic, scenery (with choices from nighttime, babies, sport, party and so on) on top of this, it has an intelligent setting (where it senses what to do -impressive!!) camera comes with a lovely paper handbook which explains everything with labelled diagrams! Find me another camera that does this, I found they were all online now with the other cameras I looked at. Thanks Maginon and if you want one Aldi are selling these in their winter sale for £69.99 BARGAIN! I had to phone Aldi to find my nearest store that had one left in stock! *****

Ignore speculations from gainsayers who haven't bothered to try this £70 camera. I have a Medion pocket camera that took a lot of good images in quite exacting conditions, and my experience so far with this Maginon one can only echo the positive comments of Valerie267. A day after shooting a lot of duck pics in and out of the sun, where the autofocus worked very well - including working continuously and QUIETLY during movies - I tried some garden shots in increasingly low-light, which it managed admirably. And my shots actually seemed to be benefitting from the vibration reduction/image stabilisation. Really will have to try switching it off to see if I can tell the difference!
Unlike Medion cameras, it doesn't come with a memory card, but the camera's continuous shooting of 720p HD movies wasn't disrupted by any write-buffering issues arising from my only using a cheap Medion brand "4"-grade 8GB SD card I bought at Aldi quite some time ago. Better-brand-name cameras and DSLRs will generally be less forgiving, but I suspect that might be because they are laying down better (i.e. more) data in movie image jpegs than this camera.
The zoom seems quite quiet, but plenty of good-make bridge cameras suffer quite badly if you zoom during a movie shot, so I'm not assuming this one will be getting away with that problem. The SZ350 really isn't giving me anything like a hard time - it even has selectable manual focus via a magnified patch of display, just like the focus in an old-fashioned film SLR viewfinder, though the menu tree doesn't always allow you to select the "M" option, and the focussing fine-tuning granularity isn't enormous. But it's miles better than not being able to control a contrary focussing engine - like the "smart" ones that want to focus on the interesting leaf textures nearby, or the brickwork of the wall in the background, when you want to focus on the actual flowers much nearer the camera lens.
Looking at the captured images using the very usable bright display screen, image quality seems generally good - not a lot a of noise speckling in the images, though I've stayed below ASA 800 so far, and I though I've pixel-peeped hard using the image review zoom magnification, I still haven't been able to find any noticeable chromatic aberration on my images. I think that tends to appear when you imagined you were working in good light conditions - something I haven't been able to do yet.
After 197 shots and a fair bit of messing about with image and movie reviewing, the battery condition indicator dropped from 3 blocks to 2, so there's still plenty to go on my first charge. I want to see how much I can do on that one charge, so I won't upload my photos yet - the PC would be re-charging the battery if I did that!
OK, it's not quite as discreet and portable as my pocketable cameras, but they really don't have the ease-of-use features and zoom reach this slightly bigger one seems to offer.

i've just bought one for £69 today, last one left!, the spec is superb, i'm used to panasonic but with 35X zoom and 20 megapixels for less than 70 quid its a no brainer, i'll let you know when how it goes.

I gave a fairly comprehensive account of the Maginon 350 in my previous comment, but at that time hadn't been able to view the images and movies on a PC screen. The PC confirms that the camera delivered competent images, some quite nice, with a natural colour balance, and was even able to work well in fading sunset light.
Maginon may not have the brand-name kudos of the big photo companies, but the camera has solid qualities. The cameras only seem to be trickling slowly into Aldi stores due to the older, dearer SZ24 model still being on the shelves, so if you want one and see one, act assertively like a recent reviewer
. The Aldi experience...
Apart from STILL being unused to having to take the lens cap off before switching the camera on, I think the Maginon 350X is an easy camera to use, and has one or two nice picture-taking features I've not seen before, including a limited manual focus capability - useful now and again but not offered in all shooting modes. It doesn't have DSLR battery life, but the camera can nevertheless take hundreds of pictures on a single charge, so battery life isn't really an issue. Viewing pictures, and particularly movies, in the field can eat into those numbers, but it's pointless having a digital camera if you don't use the screen a bit, just to see how you're getting on. Be aware the camera screen can be a bit flattering of your images and movies though. Still image size is 20 megapixels, so in high-quality mode, you might find the image files a bit bigger than you are used to, when you come to edit them in photo software. The photo software supplied with the camera is fairly uninspiring, but to get the best out of the camera you will probably want to use the software you are already used to and have some skills with.

I just bought one today at just 69.99. I got to say for the low price it can shoot some amazing pictures! It's not difficult to figure out how it works. My only problem is that I can't connect it to the PC- I use Windows 7 Starter and wonder if it's because of that that I can't seem to connect it to the pc...
Anyway, it might not be a SLR, but it's not bad either.

I don't have Windows 7, but am told that even the little Starter version of Windows 7 has and can run the Windows Explorer program, as long as you are not running too much else at the time. Look among the top-level items in Windows Explorer's left-hand column for for an item called "This PC". Click or if necessary double-click on it. It should give you a view with your C: drive and other drives and memory devices you may have (D: drive CD/DVD drive perhaps?).
When you can see them, connect the camera to your PC using the USB cable, and switch on the camera. A device icon for the camera, camera-shaped and probably named "Maginon SZ 350" should eventually appear next to your disk drives. Function Key F5 might cajole Explorer into updating its display for you.
If you double-click on the camera icon, you should be able to double-click down through layers of folders "External Memory" and "DCIM" to "100DICAM", the list of images and videos in the camera. Highlight one of the files in the file-list, then do a Ctrl-A to highlight them all, or use the mouse to highlight them all if you prefer, then use Ctrl-C or the "Copy" system menu action item if you can see one and it's active, to copy the list of files.
Then quickly navigate to a suitable picture folder on your hard drive, or one of your hard drives or memory devices, or if Windows 7 lets you, open another Windows Explorer and find a suitable hard-drive folder folder that way. Right-click in the hard-drive folder's file-list space and select "Paste", or left-click there and then either do a Ctrl-V or a click on the "Paste" icon if your Explorer has one and it's active. Copying camera files takes actual time and might involve idly staring at flying-file animated icons - or coffee-making.
Once all the files have been copied across, you can go back up to the camera's device icon, right-click on it, and select the "Eject" menu item, before physically disconnecting it when told it's OK to do so. Or, failing that, power down the PC and then switch off and disconnect the camera. Either way, the picture and video files you pasted should still be waiting for you on the hard drive or memory device.

Just picked up this camera at Aldi for £49 !!! Unbelievable value. Had a brief play and taken a few "snaps". The menu system is straightforward and easy, the quality of the photos seem to be pretty darn good. The camera looks and feels impressive. Early days yet but I'm impressed, and at the price I've just paid i simply can't go wrong.