Earlier this week, I talked about the Nikon Coolpix 8800, one of several new digital cameras recently announced by Nikon. I think the Coolpix is going to be a great camera when you can get it and if you can afford it. One thing I noticed while looking at competing models on Amazon.com is that Canon is dominating the digital camera market at the moment. By my count this morning, 7 of the top 10 cameras at Amazon are Canon PowerShot "S" or "A"-series cameras. The top sellers are:

Canon PowerShot S1 IS:
for those who think that optical zoom
is the key feature of digital cameras.
[ photo courtesy of Amazon.com ]

1. Canon PowerShot S410 Digital Elph,
2. Canon PowerShot A85,
3. Canon PowerShot S1 IS,
4. Canon PowerShot A95,
5. Canon PowerShot A300,
6. Canon PowerShot SD110 Digital Elph,
7. Kodak EasyShare CX6200,
8. Canon PowerShot S500 Digital Elph,
9. Sony Cybershot DSCP41, and
10. Sony Cybershot DSCW1.

My favorite of these cameras in this list, in terms of price and performance is the Canon PowerShot S1 IS. It's a 3.2-Megapixel camera with a 10x optical zoom. I got to play with one the other day, and it fits well in my hands, although it's larger than almost all of the other PowerShot models. That's not surprising because the PowerShot S1 IS is a model that has an SLR-like form factor.

Most of the others are compact digital cameras that produce 3, 4, or 5-Megapixel images, but only have 2x or 3x optical zoom. Once a consumer digital camera gets into the 3-Megapixel class or beyond, I am a lot more interested in the optical zoom capabilities than in increased resolution. The only reason I might de-emphasize optical zoom would be if small size was a greater priority than camera versatility.

Getting back to the list of sales leaders, I think that the timing of product lifecycles may have something to do with the fact that Canon is dominating to this extent. Canon may in fact have done their new product announcements a couple of months before their competitors, but they seem to have a lot more different cool little digital cameras than most other manufacturers. That's got to tell you a lot about what digital camera buyers want these days.