Friends and readers keep asking me “What is the best digital camera to buy”? By this, they mean a compact or point-and-shoot style digital camera. So I have drafted an article simply titled “The Best Digital Cameras“. Comments would be appreciated.
20 thoughts on “The Best Digital Cameras”
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A very nice compact (pun intended) article that should serve as a great guide for friends/readers. Ya might want to include a Sony creative compact camera (DSC-W7) as an addition.
Just curious I think Sony leads the field in Ultra Compacts and their T7 is out now, yet no mention here of it.
BTW, I am not a Sony fan (I think their UI is TERRIBLE and their fonts are worse :-), but they do make nice performing and reasonable IQ DSCs.
Happy Holidays, Phillip! Enjoyed your ‘copter log.
Dear Philip,
Seasons Greetings.
Please consider a section “camera phones”
I bought the Sony Ericsson W800i a week ago and am very pleased with the quality of the 2.0 megapixel photos.
I did compare the W800i with the Nokia N90… But due to the reviews at http://www.mobique.com/, decided on the W800i
Cheers, Kishore.
Went through and wrote up a similar process – The (nearly) perfect camera? (for my purposes).
I would categorize things a bit differently, as I do not intend to turn photography into a full-fledged hobby. Frankly I am only rarely and minimally interested in playing with manual settings, and I don’t want a camera that is a bother to carry around. To my mind the cameras you categorized as “ultra-compact” are more than good enough for most ordinary purposes. The Sony DSC-P200 is very nice, with the exceptions you noted and in the above weblog entry. Oh, also note that with the large LCD screen on the back of the camera, your comment about the cramped viewfinder is pretty much irrelevant (why use the viewfinder?).
BTW, there is an advantage to high mega-pixel counts you left out – cropping. I can crop out a large part of the original picture (hindsight of sorts) and still have very good quality on the remainder.
For those uses where an “ultra-compact” does not perform well, ended up buying a Canon PowerShot S2 IS to add to my Sony DCS-P200. I still take the Sony when hiking (less bother) and when the taking pictures is incidental.
Have not had the Canon long enough to form an opinion – my only note so far is to wish the LCD on the Canon was as big and bright as the one on the Sony. In retrospect I would weigh the size of the LCD (and brightness) rather more heavily – the 2.5″ LCD on the Sony is much easier to make out than the 1.8″ LCD on the Canon.
Hi Philip, I have several comments:
First, the Kodak P880 lens is NOT image-stabilized. The Kodak P850 lens (36–432/2.8–3.7) is image-stabilized but not the P880’s. Which brings up another point: I feel you left out a very important point-and-shoot camera category, the Super-Zooms.
Super-Zoom cameras like the Kodak P850, Sony DSC-HI, Canon PowerShot S2 IS, Panasonic DMC-FZ30 and DMC-FZ5, all with image-stabilization, have become increasing popular the past couple of years. They give parents the ability (while not as good as a real D-SLR) to get decent close-up photos of their kids playing soccer or Little League baseball without having to spend the extra money needed for a D-SLR with a 100-400 IS zoom lens.
Which leads to one more point. Both Panasonic and Fujifilm have produced some real nice digital point-and-shoot cameras that are worth mentioning. I already have mentioned a couple of nice Panasonic cameras. In regards to Fujifilm, its compact Finepix E900 and E550 digital cameras are two great cameras, producing photos of excellent quality with very minimal shutter lag compared to other cameras of their class and also first-rate 640×480 30fps video too.
Peter: I was mislead by a press release on the P880. Thanks for the correction. Are the Super-Zooms actually responsive enough to make sports photography practical? And those Fuji cameras… didn’t they used to play some games with resolution, so that their 6 MP was really 3 MP? Are they still inflating resolution? It seemed like a bad idea because you would burn up memory cards so fast.
Kishore: I haven’t played enough with camera phones to write about them. I probably should have a section though.
Sony fans: I’ve never ended up wanting to buy a Sony digital camera, though I’m not sure quite why. The Canons always seem to be the right cameras for me and the Kodaks the right cameras for my friends who are non-gearheads.
I would add the Olympus C-7070 to the “Creative Compacts” section. The lens is a little slower than the Canon at 27 – 110/2.8-4.8, but you gain a true wide angle.
I don’t own one, but people seem to generaly like the lens quality very much, as well as handling. Just like the older C-5060 5MP, also one of the few <35mm lenses in this class.
Philip,
Two comments/questions:
1. In your articles you keep saying that the larger sensor will “catch” more light. However, I don’t think it has to do with sensor size, but more with the lens size. In terms of quantity of light, it doesn’t really matter if the light that the lens “catches” is projected on a sensor of area X, or on a sensor of area 2*X.
2. The size of the sensor correspons more to the amount of noise, but this has less to do with physics than with the current state of technology (at least at the today’s sensor sizes). I fully expect that in 10 years the tiny sensors built into pocket cameras will have the same noise characteristics as today’s SLR sensors.
3. Canon S2 IS has lots of noise at ISO 400, thus it doesn’t really fall into your SLR-like category description: “… and better image quality in low light”.
As somebody who takes a lot of photographs of my kids who find it hard to keep still, the _only_ way to get good photographs indoors without a flash is to take a SLR and use a very fast lens. For Canon owners on a budget I’d recommend the Canon 50mm f/1.8, which is a bargain at $80.
Dejan
Sorry about formatting of the above post, for some reason your comment system has stripped all the line breaks. Is there a way to edit the post to fix that, or at least preview before posting?
Philip, in the ‘creative compact’ arena, you should take a look at the Panasonic DMC-LX1. This has a Leica 28mm-112mm, f2.8-4.9 lens, very good optical stabilization, and RAW is supported by the Adobe plug-in. It also has a 16:9 native format (8.4 MP). There were/are a lot of ‘net reports of it being ‘noisy’ but in my practical use it’s just not noticable. You can see some of my snapshots at http://flickr.com/photos/notio/ and heres’s what Lumnious Landscape had to say: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/lx1.shtml
I’d second the Panasonic FZ line. The lense is 2.8 troughout the zoom range(36-432mm). No RAW in <=FZ20, but FZ30 adds that + some more features. Also even back at the FZ1 days they were some of the fastest nonSLR around in terms of latency(pushing button – actual picture being taken) which made all the difference between taking picture of your kids or an empty slide.
I’d third the Panasonic line. When I do not wish to tote all my dSLR gear I use my DMC-FZ20. I think the FZ30 is even quite a bit improved over that. dpreview.com is the single best web site I have found for reviews.
Dejan: I don’t know where I said anything about a sensor “catching” light. I can’t find that in this article. I do say that small sensors result in higher noise, which I think is true with current technology. Certainly the ultracompacts are all very noisy in low light and the real SLRs are pretty good. If you had an f/1.0 lens, obviously you’d have less of a noise problem with any given sensor since more photons would reach the sensor.
Sorry about the Manila software. It is a Dave Winer creation, not mine! And I’m pleased to say that I have no ability to edit the scripts.
Michael: I did not list the Panasonic DMC-LX1 or its Leica equivalent as “creative compacts” because they don’t have optical viewfinders. I think that they therefore are not that appealing to old folks such as myself who are transitioning from the film world. If you’re going to have an electronic viewfinder or simply compose the image on the rear LCD, I think you might as well get an SLR-like camera, no?
Phil,
you asked for comments on your camera review, so here are mine…
obviously you need to tailor the article to your target audience. my guess is that these folks are probably not camera afficionados, thus I think you went into far too much detail.
you probably would have better served your readers by breaking the cameras down into price categories. isn’t that what most of us think of first and foremost?
ps…
did you fly over natick in your new ‘copter around mid-day on 12/24?
I happened to see a helicopter that looked a lot like yours.
Probably worth noting that the Ricoh GR-1 requires an external (additional cost) optical viewfinder….
Philip,
If I’m reading your articles correctly, you did say that a larger sensor will ‘catch’ more light. From your article on building a DSLR system: “If there are 8 megapixels spread out over a sensor that is 4 times larger than the sensor in a point-and-shoot camera that means more photons of light will fall on any given pixel.”
My nit-picking notwithstanding, _thank you_ for writing these great articles. You’ve been a great influence in how I do databases and photography.
Dejan
Philip, Nice job. The article is a good match for the intended audience and the advice is better than that of Consumer Reports. For folks on a tight budget, I’d add a parenthetical reference to the Canon PowerShot A610, which offers about the same features and image quality as the A620, but is 30% cheaper (in the US). The main difference is pixel count, which, as you mention, doesn’t really matter.
Phil Atio: Good call on Canon A610. In fact, my general buying advice to folks who ask me about cameras is to go to dpreview.com, sort the reviewed cameras by rating, and then simply pick the ones that fit their budget from the “highly recommended” category. That usually narrows it to two or three model lines.
I would add something about batteries.
Traveling in odd places and having batteries die is a pain. For a simple point and shoot and you travel a lot stick to AA or AAA batteries.
I fourth the Panasonic super zoom p-n-s. I have an FZ5 and 12x optical w/ image stabilization in a compact is very, very nice.