Vivitar TO28 12MP

[Beav]

Hello. A friend of mine is wanting to get in to photography but only as a small hobby. He has been looking at point and shoot cameras and found a vivtar TO28 12MP in Argos for £40. The reviews seem good but what do you guys think for someone starting out? Im new to photography myself so I don't want to tell him its good just because a few people put good reviews on the website. In other words ide rather get the pros opinions on here

http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Search/searchTerms/5596784.htm#pdpProductReviews

 

[squishy]

For £40 there's only so much you can expect. It'll take pictures and they'll probably look ok at web size, but it won't allow much room to learn about manual controls or experiment with DoF. One thing that worries me in the specs is that it only specs digital zoom, suggesting it has no optical zoom. That would likely mean a drastic image quality drop whenever you zoom in.

IMHO it depends what you mean by "is wanting to get into photography". If he just wants to take snaps then there probably won't be much wrong with it, if he's looking to try and get more serious about it then he'd probably grow out of it very quickly.