Baseball Cards Price - How much zoom do you need to take pictures from the upper deck at a baseball game?

How much zoom do you need to take pictures from the upper deck at a baseball game?

I'm not looking to spend more than $350 or anything fancy, but I might if that's what it takes to get good pictures when I go to Yankee Stadium. How much zoom do I need? Some say 10X. I'm looking at CoolPix right now. What camera do you think I should get?

Public Comments

You would want a 400mm+ 35mm-equivalent focal length at a bare minimum. Using Nikon gear a relatively inexpensive way to achieve that minimum would be a D80, a 2:1 teleconverter and a used Ai-S 180mm f/2.8 which would give you 540mm equivalent length for under $1500. Even the more extreme point&shoot bodies are not going to have the length to handle that situation. The Canon S5IS at 432mm 35mm-equivalent or the Sony DSC-H50 at 465mm is about as long as you can get. And referring to reach of cameras by zoom multiplier is meaningless. A 24-120mm and an 80-400mm are both 5x zooms, but their focal lengths hardly even overlap.