Cameras
Thoughts on choosing a digital camera.
Ian
Since we've been away I've taken about 8,000
photographs. Between the four of us we've travelled with seven cameras: I carry
two, the girls each have one, I've broken and replaced both of mine and Zoe has
lost and replaced hers. Here's what I've learned. Please post me comments or
email if you have any views.
I'd identify four considerations in choosing a camera, and I'll list them in order of decreasing importance below. IMHO the first two are far more important than the third and fourth, yet it's the last two that command all the attention in camera reviews.
1) Will you have your camera with you when you need it?
I've spoken to very many people this year who carry around SLR's on their travels. Of those I've spoken to at length, and they have tended to be the most serious, virtually all of them have had a Nikon. If you followed my blogs from Rangiroa and Australia you'll know that I was tempted to buy one myself when I ruined the better of my cameras (the Olympus). I notice, though, that for people who do have an SLR taking it out with them is an occasion, whereas I virtually always have mine with me. Because the SLR's are so heavy they're a burden to carry. Because they're so expensive their owners tend not to go wading into the sea with them, for example, and have a heightened consciousness of the possibility of theft. Their high cost invariably leads to the SLR's being cocooned in a protective bag that further inflates their size and the inconvenience of use. And because a couple of different lenses are needed for wide and telephoto shots, even when you do have an SLR camera with you you might well only be packing half of the capability that you need. In contrast if you have a camera that fits in the pocket of your jeans it will probably be there when you want to take a shot. So if like me you might be taking all sorts of snaps all day long you need to be unusually dedicated to make an SLR the sensible choice.
Sometimes I just don't want to be seen with a camera (in Fez, for example, it was a magnet for faux guides) or I don't want to sling even a light one over my shoulder. That's why I carry a pocket camera. When we left England I had a Minolota that I liked even though it looked like a relic from the Soviet era. That started jamming and got sent home and now I have a Nikon Coolpix 7900. I'm not too enamoured with it but I do like always having a camera with me. A picture phone might one day serve the same purpose if the technology improves.
2) Will you be able to take the shots you want to?
Sometimes I like to wander around a book shop with no idea of what I'm after in the hope of serendipitously coming across something new. At other times I'm after a particular book and nothing else. Photography can be similar. With only a small jeans camera you can, like the merry browser, happily fill an album full of decent snaps. However, when we're travelling I'm more usually in the mode of wanting a particular photograph, especially when we're somewhere that's fauna-rich. At these times no camera that you can fit in your pocket is up to the job. To be able to take the photos that you want rather than just those that you can get, here's what you need:
(a) A decent zoom. I have a 10X optical zoom on my Olympus and I wouldn't go lower. This is, BTW, far better than you'll get on the default lens on an SLR, which is why you need two. If you look at my snaps of the lilac-breasted roller and the saddle-billed stork on the Africa link from our homepage, for example, both were taken at full zoom. These are far better than the equivalent pictures taken with the girls' compacts.
(b) A reasonable wide-angle. This is important for many shots, particularly buildings. Personally, I like the shot on our Chile page that has the photo of the woman on the right and the admiralty building behind it. Our new friend Dave, who is a professional photographer, was with us and taking photos for the Insight guides. He also liked this snap when we reviewed them later and said that he couldn't have taken it with the lens he had with him for his Nikon SLR.
(c) Good night capability. My Olympus is very average at night shots and after dark my Coolpix, despite it's multitude of night time settings, is less use for recording high quality images than a pencil and paper. I've tried everything on the Coolpix and all I've been able to do is find a variety of weapons (violent multi-flash, infrared beam...) to attack the eyesight of my subjects. I suspect that a decent SLR would function more reliably than both of my cameras, even, perhaps, without packing a separate flash.
(d) Ability to focus. My Olympus only has an autofocus and there are times when it doesn't work. For example, if there are birds inside a bush I wont be able to take a crisp photo of them because the camera will inevitably prefer to lock on twigs or foliage. When we were in Maine i was also unable to get decent photos of whales breaching because by the time the camera had found the whale it was back underwater. Generally, though, it's pretty competent. For example, on our Galapagos page there's a photo of a booby diving into the sea near to some snorkellers. It's a little blurred (made worse, I guess, when I cropped out some sea) but after watching the bird dive a few times and seeing what it was doing it only took me one shot to get the photo I wanted. Again, this was on high zoom.
(e) Speed. As well as the time it can take to focus, another factor is how long it takes to turn the camera on or wake it from auto-sleep - this drives me nuts sometimes. My old Olympus (a C765 Ultrazoom) was very quirky and would turn itself off if you tried to switch it on and use it too quickly. Its replacement (an SP-500 UZ) is much better. When the camera is on the speed at which you can fire off a burst of shots can also matter. On the SP-500 there are a couple of settings to improve this, though if you need to do it without warning that's not much help. SLR's ought to be much better. I had a good chance to compare in Argentina when I went out with Robin and came across some condors from a vantage point above them. He had taken his Nikon D70 out for the day and I had my C765. As soon as we arrived at a position from where we could take photos of the birds feasting on the carcass of a cow, they saw us and flew off. As I took a few snaps I could hear Robin's Nikon running off a sequence of impressive kerrr-zip sounds. The upshot, though, wouldn't compel you to buy the far more expensive camera. I included one of my best condor shots on the blog High Jinx at the Estancia and I'm not sure that Robin did so well. Again, he was probably impaired by not having a good zoom attached at the time.
(f) Underwater capability. You can get an underwater casing for some cameras, which extends what you can do with them nicely, though few people need it. Heidi's little Olympus mju has a case that you can use in shallow water. I used this to take the underwater sharks photo on our Rangiroa page. Manufacturers of some other cameras make housings that can produce better shots that work down to SCUBA depths, though these are far more expensive and probably require a light if you're much below the surface. There's one for the Coolpix, I'm told, but the guy who sold me the camera in Chicago said that they had to be ordered specially from Nikon.
3) How is the picture quality?
If you didn't have your camera with you or couldn't make the shot you wanted this question wont arise, will it.
But if you did then it's nice to have a crisp, detailed photo with vivid and true colours. I've been able to make a good comparison of all of our cameras and a Nikon D70 from photographs taken in The Galapagos islands. The D70 was provided by Rachel, although since she showed them to us on her 17" mac Powerbook that may have flattered her shots relative to mine, which I've only seen on my 15" Powerbook screen. There are some opportunities for thoughtful composition work in The Galapagos and a few occasions in which a zoom helps but for most shots you just walk up to fantastic birds and beasts who don't care about you; snappers with neither a zoom nor an eye for photography will end up with the same shots as a pro. In a direct comparison Rachel and her D70 had a few more top class photos than I did with the C765. Even so, those people who've actually seen our physical book of photos composed from our shots in The Galapagos Islands (we haven't) report their quality to be excellent.
Each month by taking a very large number of photos we've always ended up with enough to make a pretty classy book. There are systematic weaknesses in both of my cameras. For example, on normal skies the colour can tend to be washed out, and the majority of shots are over-exposed. The sky thing can be sometimes be alleviated by using the landscape scene mode, which manages to extract more blue from the sky, and the over-exposure and low contrast are easily fixed with software.
One metric that I don't find means that much is the number of megapixels. My C765 had 4 (the SP-500 has 6), while the Coolpix has around 8. The only certain difference is that the Coolpix snaps consume twice as much disk and card space, with no obvious benefit. I guess that I didn't have my zoomy Olympus I might more frequently and harshly crop the Coolpix photos to get the interpolation function to cover, and then the high pixel density would presumably help. But it's incomparably better just to have the zoom.
4) Everything else
Besides all of the considerations above there are still facts and features that are cool/annoying at the margin. One of these is cost. In Melbourne with a weak Aussie dollar my SP-500, which was a brand new model, cost about £230. If I wanted to buy an SLR with the same focus range I'd need a couple of lenses and I'd be paying somewhere in the range of five to ten times the amount. Actually, the cost was not an overriding factor: if I'd thought an SLR was the right camera for me then the cost of it would amortise down to a sum that I could accept over the decade or more for which I might expect to use it. On the other hand, it's nice to feel that if the new camera follows the old one into the sea or gets stolen from a train then it's not a major financial event.
Other features that I like in both of my cameras include that they're black and look nice, and they have a nice bulge grip. Also they both have an optical viewfinder, and in the case of the SP-500 (though not the C765) this shows the same as the LCD screen, being what you will actually take. Many compact cameras have dispensed with this since the parallax effect from a naive optical viewfinder can be misleading and takes up space, but I prefer to use it on sunny days when the screen can be hard to see properly.
Reliability matters; I don't know how you would evaluate it but I bet a chunky Nikon SLR is more robust than anything else. My first two digital cameras were both Canon Ixuses (or Ixi); when the second one failed in the same way as the first (jammed lense) I decided my third one would be different (it was the Minolta).
Unbelievably, on the Coolpix you can't conveniently see the photographs that you've taken without the camera's annotations obscuring them, which in itself is almost a good enough reason to buy another camera. The best camera we have for playback is Zoe's Konica, which has a nice big LCD screen.
Also useful is battery life. The SP-500 takes 4 rechargeable AA batteries, while all our cameras, including the C765, used proprietary format batteries. As well as preserving my sanity, the switch to a standard has been accompanied by far superior battery life.
Features that don't matter at all to me include: a variety of pre-set modes (the cuisine one on the Coolpix, for example, is useless - far worse than the auto setting); the ability to swivel the lens round so that I can take a photo of myself; and the ability to stream photos wirelessly to my computer (why??) or over email. The pointless bluetooth upload is built into the newest Coolpix version. Instead, they'd be better off finding a way to make a version of an SD card (or an XD card in the case of Olympus) that's as fast as the Sony memory stick. Rather than faffing around with cables I have a PCMCIA media adapter in my Powerbook that accepts all three formats, and the Sony is streets quicker than the other two (including the supposedly fast SD cards) for loading photos; but it's no big deal. Neither do I care for vendor-specific photo management software. I use iPhoto and about once every 1,000 photos I find it helpful to use Photoshop Elements. If I needed more than this, which I wont, I'd buy Aperture.
Conclusion
You know that when my own cash was at stake I bought the SP-500. If I'd had more time I would also have evaluated the other superzooms on the market. In a way it's a strange category of camera and I did wonder whether once you've decided that you need a camera that requires a shoulder strap rather than one that fits in your jeans you mightn't be better going up to an SLR. This is what I secretly suspected I might do, and after one blog I was kind of hoping someone out there would convince me to. If I did buy an SLR I'd have only sentiment to guide me, and this would lead me to look at Nikon then to Sony then to Canon and then to Minolta in that order. I'd still like to get more data points regarding how the SLR's match up on the factors that matter to me (especially in the second category above) and to hear from anyone who addresses the same choice. In the meantime I like my SP-500.
I'd identify four considerations in choosing a camera, and I'll list them in order of decreasing importance below. IMHO the first two are far more important than the third and fourth, yet it's the last two that command all the attention in camera reviews.
1) Will you have your camera with you when you need it?
I've spoken to very many people this year who carry around SLR's on their travels. Of those I've spoken to at length, and they have tended to be the most serious, virtually all of them have had a Nikon. If you followed my blogs from Rangiroa and Australia you'll know that I was tempted to buy one myself when I ruined the better of my cameras (the Olympus). I notice, though, that for people who do have an SLR taking it out with them is an occasion, whereas I virtually always have mine with me. Because the SLR's are so heavy they're a burden to carry. Because they're so expensive their owners tend not to go wading into the sea with them, for example, and have a heightened consciousness of the possibility of theft. Their high cost invariably leads to the SLR's being cocooned in a protective bag that further inflates their size and the inconvenience of use. And because a couple of different lenses are needed for wide and telephoto shots, even when you do have an SLR camera with you you might well only be packing half of the capability that you need. In contrast if you have a camera that fits in the pocket of your jeans it will probably be there when you want to take a shot. So if like me you might be taking all sorts of snaps all day long you need to be unusually dedicated to make an SLR the sensible choice.
Sometimes I just don't want to be seen with a camera (in Fez, for example, it was a magnet for faux guides) or I don't want to sling even a light one over my shoulder. That's why I carry a pocket camera. When we left England I had a Minolota that I liked even though it looked like a relic from the Soviet era. That started jamming and got sent home and now I have a Nikon Coolpix 7900. I'm not too enamoured with it but I do like always having a camera with me. A picture phone might one day serve the same purpose if the technology improves.
2) Will you be able to take the shots you want to?
Sometimes I like to wander around a book shop with no idea of what I'm after in the hope of serendipitously coming across something new. At other times I'm after a particular book and nothing else. Photography can be similar. With only a small jeans camera you can, like the merry browser, happily fill an album full of decent snaps. However, when we're travelling I'm more usually in the mode of wanting a particular photograph, especially when we're somewhere that's fauna-rich. At these times no camera that you can fit in your pocket is up to the job. To be able to take the photos that you want rather than just those that you can get, here's what you need:
(a) A decent zoom. I have a 10X optical zoom on my Olympus and I wouldn't go lower. This is, BTW, far better than you'll get on the default lens on an SLR, which is why you need two. If you look at my snaps of the lilac-breasted roller and the saddle-billed stork on the Africa link from our homepage, for example, both were taken at full zoom. These are far better than the equivalent pictures taken with the girls' compacts.
(b) A reasonable wide-angle. This is important for many shots, particularly buildings. Personally, I like the shot on our Chile page that has the photo of the woman on the right and the admiralty building behind it. Our new friend Dave, who is a professional photographer, was with us and taking photos for the Insight guides. He also liked this snap when we reviewed them later and said that he couldn't have taken it with the lens he had with him for his Nikon SLR.
(c) Good night capability. My Olympus is very average at night shots and after dark my Coolpix, despite it's multitude of night time settings, is less use for recording high quality images than a pencil and paper. I've tried everything on the Coolpix and all I've been able to do is find a variety of weapons (violent multi-flash, infrared beam...) to attack the eyesight of my subjects. I suspect that a decent SLR would function more reliably than both of my cameras, even, perhaps, without packing a separate flash.
(d) Ability to focus. My Olympus only has an autofocus and there are times when it doesn't work. For example, if there are birds inside a bush I wont be able to take a crisp photo of them because the camera will inevitably prefer to lock on twigs or foliage. When we were in Maine i was also unable to get decent photos of whales breaching because by the time the camera had found the whale it was back underwater. Generally, though, it's pretty competent. For example, on our Galapagos page there's a photo of a booby diving into the sea near to some snorkellers. It's a little blurred (made worse, I guess, when I cropped out some sea) but after watching the bird dive a few times and seeing what it was doing it only took me one shot to get the photo I wanted. Again, this was on high zoom.
(e) Speed. As well as the time it can take to focus, another factor is how long it takes to turn the camera on or wake it from auto-sleep - this drives me nuts sometimes. My old Olympus (a C765 Ultrazoom) was very quirky and would turn itself off if you tried to switch it on and use it too quickly. Its replacement (an SP-500 UZ) is much better. When the camera is on the speed at which you can fire off a burst of shots can also matter. On the SP-500 there are a couple of settings to improve this, though if you need to do it without warning that's not much help. SLR's ought to be much better. I had a good chance to compare in Argentina when I went out with Robin and came across some condors from a vantage point above them. He had taken his Nikon D70 out for the day and I had my C765. As soon as we arrived at a position from where we could take photos of the birds feasting on the carcass of a cow, they saw us and flew off. As I took a few snaps I could hear Robin's Nikon running off a sequence of impressive kerrr-zip sounds. The upshot, though, wouldn't compel you to buy the far more expensive camera. I included one of my best condor shots on the blog High Jinx at the Estancia and I'm not sure that Robin did so well. Again, he was probably impaired by not having a good zoom attached at the time.
(f) Underwater capability. You can get an underwater casing for some cameras, which extends what you can do with them nicely, though few people need it. Heidi's little Olympus mju has a case that you can use in shallow water. I used this to take the underwater sharks photo on our Rangiroa page. Manufacturers of some other cameras make housings that can produce better shots that work down to SCUBA depths, though these are far more expensive and probably require a light if you're much below the surface. There's one for the Coolpix, I'm told, but the guy who sold me the camera in Chicago said that they had to be ordered specially from Nikon.
3) How is the picture quality?
If you didn't have your camera with you or couldn't make the shot you wanted this question wont arise, will it.
But if you did then it's nice to have a crisp, detailed photo with vivid and true colours. I've been able to make a good comparison of all of our cameras and a Nikon D70 from photographs taken in The Galapagos islands. The D70 was provided by Rachel, although since she showed them to us on her 17" mac Powerbook that may have flattered her shots relative to mine, which I've only seen on my 15" Powerbook screen. There are some opportunities for thoughtful composition work in The Galapagos and a few occasions in which a zoom helps but for most shots you just walk up to fantastic birds and beasts who don't care about you; snappers with neither a zoom nor an eye for photography will end up with the same shots as a pro. In a direct comparison Rachel and her D70 had a few more top class photos than I did with the C765. Even so, those people who've actually seen our physical book of photos composed from our shots in The Galapagos Islands (we haven't) report their quality to be excellent.
Each month by taking a very large number of photos we've always ended up with enough to make a pretty classy book. There are systematic weaknesses in both of my cameras. For example, on normal skies the colour can tend to be washed out, and the majority of shots are over-exposed. The sky thing can be sometimes be alleviated by using the landscape scene mode, which manages to extract more blue from the sky, and the over-exposure and low contrast are easily fixed with software.
One metric that I don't find means that much is the number of megapixels. My C765 had 4 (the SP-500 has 6), while the Coolpix has around 8. The only certain difference is that the Coolpix snaps consume twice as much disk and card space, with no obvious benefit. I guess that I didn't have my zoomy Olympus I might more frequently and harshly crop the Coolpix photos to get the interpolation function to cover, and then the high pixel density would presumably help. But it's incomparably better just to have the zoom.
4) Everything else
Besides all of the considerations above there are still facts and features that are cool/annoying at the margin. One of these is cost. In Melbourne with a weak Aussie dollar my SP-500, which was a brand new model, cost about £230. If I wanted to buy an SLR with the same focus range I'd need a couple of lenses and I'd be paying somewhere in the range of five to ten times the amount. Actually, the cost was not an overriding factor: if I'd thought an SLR was the right camera for me then the cost of it would amortise down to a sum that I could accept over the decade or more for which I might expect to use it. On the other hand, it's nice to feel that if the new camera follows the old one into the sea or gets stolen from a train then it's not a major financial event.
Other features that I like in both of my cameras include that they're black and look nice, and they have a nice bulge grip. Also they both have an optical viewfinder, and in the case of the SP-500 (though not the C765) this shows the same as the LCD screen, being what you will actually take. Many compact cameras have dispensed with this since the parallax effect from a naive optical viewfinder can be misleading and takes up space, but I prefer to use it on sunny days when the screen can be hard to see properly.
Reliability matters; I don't know how you would evaluate it but I bet a chunky Nikon SLR is more robust than anything else. My first two digital cameras were both Canon Ixuses (or Ixi); when the second one failed in the same way as the first (jammed lense) I decided my third one would be different (it was the Minolta).
Unbelievably, on the Coolpix you can't conveniently see the photographs that you've taken without the camera's annotations obscuring them, which in itself is almost a good enough reason to buy another camera. The best camera we have for playback is Zoe's Konica, which has a nice big LCD screen.
Also useful is battery life. The SP-500 takes 4 rechargeable AA batteries, while all our cameras, including the C765, used proprietary format batteries. As well as preserving my sanity, the switch to a standard has been accompanied by far superior battery life.
Features that don't matter at all to me include: a variety of pre-set modes (the cuisine one on the Coolpix, for example, is useless - far worse than the auto setting); the ability to swivel the lens round so that I can take a photo of myself; and the ability to stream photos wirelessly to my computer (why??) or over email. The pointless bluetooth upload is built into the newest Coolpix version. Instead, they'd be better off finding a way to make a version of an SD card (or an XD card in the case of Olympus) that's as fast as the Sony memory stick. Rather than faffing around with cables I have a PCMCIA media adapter in my Powerbook that accepts all three formats, and the Sony is streets quicker than the other two (including the supposedly fast SD cards) for loading photos; but it's no big deal. Neither do I care for vendor-specific photo management software. I use iPhoto and about once every 1,000 photos I find it helpful to use Photoshop Elements. If I needed more than this, which I wont, I'd buy Aperture.
Conclusion
You know that when my own cash was at stake I bought the SP-500. If I'd had more time I would also have evaluated the other superzooms on the market. In a way it's a strange category of camera and I did wonder whether once you've decided that you need a camera that requires a shoulder strap rather than one that fits in your jeans you mightn't be better going up to an SLR. This is what I secretly suspected I might do, and after one blog I was kind of hoping someone out there would convince me to. If I did buy an SLR I'd have only sentiment to guide me, and this would lead me to look at Nikon then to Sony then to Canon and then to Minolta in that order. I'd still like to get more data points regarding how the SLR's match up on the factors that matter to me (especially in the second category above) and to hear from anyone who addresses the same choice. In the meantime I like my SP-500.
Posted: Wed - January 11, 2006 at 01:15 PM
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Published On: Jan 12, 2006 08:04 AM
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Published On: Jan 12, 2006 08:04 AM