Unfortunately I haven't done that many sky photos to show you. Here are all the shots I found in my S400 archives that had sky in them. One reason I stay with Canon is the way they render colors and their control of digital noise (equiv. to film grain). Especially in skies. Nothing can ruin a good sky shot quicker for me than a lot of noise/grain.
Browse
this gallery for a few sky and sunset shots made with the D60.
I'd have to say that if skies are the most important to you, you might want to go with something with a little more exposure control than the S400. In all honesty an S400 meters great and you'd probably be able to make the kinds of shots you want with it. For me, though, I'd rather have a bit more control than the S400 allows. I'd also want the ability to shoot in RAW mode so I would have the most possible data in the pic to work with to allow me to recover as much tonal detail as possible. The D60 shots you see in the above gallery were shot in CRW (Canon's RAW format) and processed into .tiff files for editing, and then to JPG for display and sharing.
With all that garbage said (Ya think I could talk about this stuff all day or what?
) I think the G5 would be an excellent choice. I had a G3 (4 megapixels) and loved it. For what you want to do, I think it would be a better choice than the S400. The S50 has plenty of options and control but from what I've seen in sample photos, it produces more digital noise than the G3 I had.
Oh, and watch out buying from some of those online sellers with those too good to be true prices. Some of them sell grey market (imported with no US warranty) stuff. Some take things out of the kit and want to sell them to you separately to make up what they're losing by selling for the advertised prices. Things like the battery charger! And some will rape you on shipping charges to make up the loss.
I do most all my photo equipment business with 17th Street Photo (
www.17photo.com ) or B&H Photo (
www.bhphotovideo.com. They have competitive "REAL" prices and no bull shiot add on charges and they charge honest shipping rates. No rip offs, just straight up business. I prefer to do business with 17th Street when they have what I want and are within a few $ on price with B&H. Much more pleasureable to deal with than the arrogant people at B&H. B&H is safe to deal with, they just have big time NY attitude.
Let me know what you end up going with. Oh, and lastly, don't forget that tripod if you want nice, sharp, detailed 8 X 10 prints. Printing that large, or larger really shows any hand/camera shake!
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