Recommend A Certain Kind of Crappy Digital P&S

[nightfly]

So I'm looking for a digital point and shoot that takes sorta crappy, grainy black and whites. The fancy ones that are beloved of some (like the GRD which I've had) actually seem to pick up too much in the mid greys even with post processing. I actually want something that looks like the kind of thing teenage girls shoot of themselves in bad light when they want it to look artsy (pulled semi-randomly off Flickr, I like this persons shots):

I'm thinking of what William Klein's shots would look like if digital. Dark blacks, blown out whites and grain, but not the digital grain that seems screw up the blacks in many digitial photos.

Any ideas? If it shot quickly and was small, that would be good too. Old, new, whatever.

 

[Graham Line]

Try the mid-range Canon A560 or A620 or something in that range, and pump up the ISO. They give a nice range of tones that you can experiment with quite a bit, even in a .jpg. Biggest drawback is they don't have very wide lenses.

 

[nightfly]

Yeah 28mm would be great. I would live with 30 or 32 but I guess I would settle for 36 or whatever a lot of these now come with. Not sure if the look I want is characteristic of older 5 or 6 meg cameras or the newer ones with way too many pixels on the sensor. I don't want that smeary type of noise reduction look though.

 

[Graham Line]

The 'look' in the pic you posted reminds me of work that turned up places like the old US Camera Annual (I worked in a library -- I'm not THAT old) and was done on older single-coated lenses and films with kind of an exaggerated red response. Printed on Agfa Brovira or a similar silver-rich paper, of course.
You can mimic that with 'blur' functions, contrast adjustments and the color sliders when you convert the digital color image to B&W.
The best thing to do is fill a card with images and spend an afternoon with PS or Elements to hit on a routine.
Ricoh makes a little P&S that goes to a 28mm equivalent view.