Daniel Rutter gets snap happy about photography in the 21st century.
Digital still cameras (DSCs) are young. The first consumer model, the Dycam Model 1 (aka Logitech FotoMan), came out in 1990 and offered 320 x 240 greyscale photos, 1MB of internal storage, fixed focus, and no zoom. It cost US$995.
The first colour film, for comparison, was invented in 1906. So it's not surprising that digital photography's got a lot more growing up to do.
What's the latest, and what's coming tomorrow? Read on.
CategoriesThere are five basic kinds of DSC. Well, roughly five, some of them blur into each other.We'll open the bidding with five, all right?
Toy-camsThe smallest, simplest and cheapest digicams are the baby, 'toy' cameras, which sell for a few hundred dollars -- well under $100 at the bottom end. More expensive toy-cams often have expandable memory, a flash and an LCD screen, but the cheaper ones don't have any of those things. All of them have no manual controls to speak of, and lousy lenses with no optical zoom; some of them output 1,600 x 1,200 files, but the lenses keep real resolution down well below 800 x 600.
But they're cheap.Mobile phone and PDA cameras are in this category too, so far. They all have a screen, of course, but their lenses are just as bad, and that's what really matters. Phone-cam pictures look as lousy as $100 digicam pictures. Sometimes as lousy as $25 digicam pictures.
Gadgets ahoy!Next up are the ultra-compacts; genuinely pocketable cameras, with decent lenses and respectable resolution. Ultra-compacts often have a full suite of basic features - flash, expandable memory, good-sized LCD screens, and even autofocus zoom lenses.
Casio's Exilim cameras are, at the moment, the epitome of the ultra-compact. This is the smallest of them, the Exilim EX-S3.
For about $750, the EX-S3 gives you 2,048 x 1,536 resolution, a flash, a surprisingly enormous (two inch!) LCD screen, 10MB of built in memory and an SD/MMC memory card slot. It's only 90 x 57 x 12mm in size, and weighs less than 90 grams in total.
The field of view of a lens is commonly expressed as a focal length, which is annoying because focal length varies depending on the size of the camera's sensor, as well as with the actual magnification power of the lens.
The focal length is how far from the sensor a pinhole would have to be to give the same field of view. But smaller sensors give the same field of view with smaller lenses. A 35mm film frame is actually 36mm wide; a '50mm' lens pointed at that sensor would become a '100mm' lens if you swapped in a 18mm wide sensor.
For this reason, focal lengths are often specified as '35mm equivalent', telling you what kind of 35mm film camera lens would give the same field of view.
For reference, the horizontal field of view of a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera is about 40 degrees. 25mm -- 80 degrees; 100mm -- 20 degrees. And so on.
The S3's an amazing package, but it has its limitations. Its tiny fixed-focus lens (which has the equivalent field of view of a 35mm focal length lens on a 35mm film camera) gives it super-fast startup and practically nonexistent shutter lag, but it doesn't give the sharpness of a larger autofocus lens. So never mind the '3.1 megapixel' image size; it isn't likely to give you more than two megapixels of image detail.
You can get a lot more features for $750, but if you don't want a lot more camera, the S3's a star.
If you'd like an S3 with a zoom lens, Casio can oblige. There's an EX-Z3, which is a bit fatter but packs a telescopic 3x zoom with autofocus. With the same nominal resolution as the S3, it costs a bit more, is a bit bigger and takes longer to start up and take pictures, but it's a real three megapixel camera. And you could still hide it in a cigarette packet.
In the same class as the EX-Z3 is Minolta's DiMAGE Xt. Yours for less than $900, it's a flat box like the EX-S3, but contains a remarkable right-angle 3x zoom lens with no protruding components. The lens limits the resolution, but it does more with its 2,048 x 1,536 nominal resolution than the EX-S3 does, and you get 37 to 111mm equivalent zoom.
One more small step up the size ladder is Canon's Digital IXUS II. On the surface, it seems to have unexciting specs considering its $899 price tag. Its telescopic autofocus lens only manages 2x optical zoom, from 35 to 70mm-equivalent, and is about the size of two stacked EX-S3s.
That limited-zoom lens produces excellent 2,048 x 1,536 images. The stainless steel casing is rock solid, it's easy and fast to control, and its 1.5 inch LCD is bright and clear.
If you're willing to trade a bit of 'wow' appeal for better photographic performance, the IXUS II is a strong ultra-compact contender.
On the fuzzy line between ultra-compacts and cameras that simply aren't big is Nikon's innovative Coolpix SQ. Its body is less than 85mm square when closed.
Nikon have been making 'hinging' digicams for years. This design lets you use the camera above your head or at waist level and still see the LCD screen, without making the controls tricky or putting the screen on a flimsy pivot.
The SQ has 2,016 x 1,512 resolution, and uses standard CompactFlash storage and like other ultra-compacts, it still runs from a proprietary battery. It has no optical viewfinder, but its LCD is useable in all kinds of lighting, even direct sunlight.
The SQ's 37-111mm equivalent zoom lens isn't quite up to the standard of the bigger lenses, but it's a good match for the camera's resolution. The lens also has the trademark Coolpix super-close-up capability. If you want to take pictures of very small things, Coolpixes have always been the point-and-shoot digicams to beat.
The SQ's street price is dips $700, and is a good buy. Technically, this camera is notably superior to the really tiny but similarly priced zoom cameras from Minolta and Casio.
The mainstreamNext up the ladder are the 'regular sized' point-and-shoot cameras, which are usually
Issue: 137 | June, 2012