I am doing a photographic course ( total length of all units 6 years or more ) at a one day a week night school , I'm now into my second term . I did B?w 7 colour film donleys years ago and took up with a £400 Olympus 1.2 MP back in 1999 had several compact since ..all canons .
Currently have a compact Canon IXUS 8.0 15 .. magnification range 3x15 it must be around five years old .. it's a great quick point and shoot jobby but can if you want and have the time to do it preset a few things . It has anti shake , can do a short movie with reasonable sound , has macro as well as telephoto and most important for me a proper view finder as well as the standard screen for i like to used the finder to frame a view instead of wasting the battery pack it has a standard SD memory card ..I have two 4 gig cards one for pictures and the other for movies .
In late 2013 I got an EOS 7D & found I needed to do the night school courses to get the best out of it for I didn't just want to use it on auto ( it gives outstanding colours & detail etc ) I wanted to learn how to quickly set it up for bracketing shots , do things in RAW etc. and set white balances quickly .
Fumbling through the 274 pages of the manual took too long , by the time I'd managed to tie up the different sections related to one action I was starting to lose the will to live .
At the camera group two of the members have canon bridge cameras with a zoom of something like 45 magnification from the integrated lens .
Both of them have some fantastic pictures , most of which are untouched .
Both of them say that the bridge jobby is ideal as it has all the instant use of a compact with much of the capabilities of the much heavier digital TTL that have god only knows how many lens changes available .
The tend to use their bridge cameras one handed as the other is usually holding onto a dog or a walking stick . They are so lightweight compared to the EOS 7D
I think the PC world price is kicking in at about £ 340 but I strongly suspect that in a month or so there will be big price drops at the on line camera stores when the new camera ranges that are arriving on the scene have been put through their paces in the camera mags and folk start wanting to buy or PE their year old models for them .
My EOS 7D mk 1 can apparently now be had for just over £600 with three lenses and all sorts of other buy me now incentives which is a heck of a lot less than the £ 1,500 some places were selling it for two year ago ( without lenses )
The professional photographer who is giving us our lessons has frequently said he no longer buys the latest model of camera or lenses , he's quite happy to buy new unused two yr old high end stuff instead .