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Technology Today – October 2011 Digital Cameras
by Robert Sanborn
Ahh, the joys of shopping for new technology. I am
in the middle of two such research projects; one for a new digital
camera, and one for a new Smartphone. This is a triple cursed time for
doing this as I wait for the horde of trick-or-treat goblins to appear
on my doorstep. Black Friday is less than a month away now, Christmas
is two months away (despite what Cracker Barrel and the other stores may
think by having their decorating already done) and worst of all for me,
the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is two and a half months
away. To make it even worse, my wife has decided that I should look at
the December 2011 issue of Consumer Reports which is the annual
electronics issue that despite all the research that I do, I really
haven’t finished it until I look at Consumer Reports. So, let’s start
with the digital camera.
Digital Camera
My current digital camera was considered one of the
best superzoom cameras of its day. It is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20 with
a then whopping five megapixel images and an incredible 12X optical zoom
with image stabilization. It has been an incredible camera and I have
the images to prove it having carried it several times to places ranging
from Enfield to Jingdezhen. I loved it, got used to it, learned how
things worked, and how to take some wonderful pictures and it was easy
but difficult to replace my film cameras with it. But unfortunately,
after long years of service, a couple of hard knocks, and many failed
batteries, it is time to replace it.
So, in July, I started to research digital cameras
and finally settled on three finalists. Panasonic’s DMC-FZ100; Canon
PowerShot SX30IS, and Sony Cybershot DSC HX100V. All have some great
features, some interesting features, and some nonexistent features.
Doing the research was actually kind of fun as there are a ton of
websites to help you and then you finally go to the store to see how the
camera feels in your hands. I went to a couple of different stores to
look at the cameras and one thing I learned very quickly is that the
answers you might get in the stores and the ones you get online don’t
often match. Another is that as you read the glowing reviews, it makes
it difficult to choose even after looking at the scoring results from
the different websites. One of the other curses of coming from using a
film camera over the years is that you get used to having things like
lens filters for dealing with smog in places like Mexico City (or Lost
Angeles); a hot shoe for using an external flash to compensate for the
pathetic short range of on board flash units, and even a simple thing
like a lens hood so that when you have to shoot with the sun facing you,
you have some semblance of help in preventing the sun spots from ruining
a good image. The final thing that eventually did in the Canon and
Panasonic cameras was the fact that when you look at the reviewer’s
comments on the quality of the image from those particular cameras, you
will find that they were near the bottom of the ratings. I had thought
that taking a picture ended up being all about the quality of the
image. If all you are interested in is a snapshot of a scene to just
say you were there, then any camera will do the job and maybe not as
well as some of the new Smartphone’s that are out there now like that
Apple iPhone 4S. But that is another issue.
So, the finalist that I came up with was the Sony
but while it had a number of really neat things like a monster 30X zoom
lens and GPS tagging of your photos; it did not have a hot shoe, filter
capability, or lens hood nor could I capture an image in any format
other than .jpg. For many photographers, .jpg is their last choice
because of the nature of what jpg does and that is to uncompress and
compress the image every time you open it up and save it. Each time you
do that, you end up losing some of the pixels in the image because that
is how .jpg compression works to give you smaller file sizes.
So, I did nothing and stewed about how unhappy I
was with my choices and decided the middle of this month to revisit my
research. The websites I have been using are really full of great
information and I am listing a few of them for you here.
www.photographyblog.com
www.imaging-resource.com
www.dpreview.com
www.steves-digicams.com
www.cameralabs.com
And of course, there are more like PC World, Cnet,
ZD Net, and others.
One of the first things I do when researching a
camera is to see when the camera was introduced and also when it was
available on the store shelves as I find that as the manufactures
constantly update their offerings, when I went back to review things,
low and behold, Panasonic and Canon have upgraded their cameras and what
really surprised me that both of them reduced the size of the digital
imaging sensors to capture better pictures. Both Canon and Panasonic
went from a 14 to 12 megapixel camera and the quality of the images in
both improved significantly. Someone was listening. The Canon PowerShot
SX40HS will be available mid-November and the Panasonic DMC-FZ150K
probably in December. Both will be over $400. Now to go see how they
feel in actual use.
Robert Sanborn
robert@pcll.com |
