My girlfriend is looking to upgrade. Currently she has the s700 and has taken some great photos with it. She is basically a nature photographer and enjoys pictures of scenery, flowers in supermacro and wildlife. She is looking to upgrade her camera now largely because she had some photo ops while on vacation that didn't turn out. (wildlife about 10 feet away but couldn't get close enough with zoom to really bring out details) She's also run into several opportunities where the autofocus couldn't manage what should have been a decent shot and not enough time for the manual focus on the s700 (anyone who's used it will understand). She is still an amature but would love to move to professional someday. While I was looking around the web, I found the newest Finepix the s100fs. It looks like its a fairly good upgrade and designed specifically for the nature photographer with image stabilization and a good lense. Its a wide angle lense 28-400mm equiv. I think this should be good enough for her to get in close on say a bee landing on a flower a few feet away. But the s700 had a 35-380mm lens and wasn't close enough photos. (I dont really understand how that all works exactly) The s700 is only 7MP and the s100fs is 11MP. Its also got the film simulation which seems to me a great feature. She's only used digital so the concept of different film types is a little new to her though. The s700 is f3.5-f13.6 where the s100fs is f2.8-f11. I'm trying to help her decide if the upgrade is worth it. ($500 for the s00fs) Has anyone got experience with these two to say if its worth the upgrade? I don't think it would be possible to get an equivalent dSLR and better lense for that price? If so, is there one you can recommend? Especially the super zoom part. 400mm seems to be a pretty beefy and getting something like that and a good supermacro lense that can focus at .4 inches away would be expensive.
Here are the reviews/specs on the two cameras for you pro's to compare:
s700:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/spec...nepixs5700.asp
s100fs:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/spec...ilm_S100FS.asp
Thanks for helping a photo Newb!