Digital Compact Cameras?

The time has come to replace my Canon Ixus 500. What do people recommend? I was looking at the new Canons but they don't get the best reviews. I was also thinking of the Panasonic FX550.

(Wide angle would be nice but not essential)

So, what have you got?

Here's my shortlist (with selling-points) from when I last went looking, about six months ago:

Canon Powershot G10 (optical viewfinder, uncompressed mode)
Fujifilm F200EXR (dual stabilisation, ISO12800)
Panasonic Lumix TZ7 (12x zoom, ISO6400)
Panasonic Lumix LX3 (only 2.5x zoom but very bright f2.0-2.8 lens, ISO6400, uncompressed mode)
Ricoh CXI (120fps video)
Samsung HZ10W (dual stabilisation, remote control)
Olympus u9000 (dual stabilisation, 10x zoom)

I went with the Fuji in the end, having decided that the lack of low-light performance was the thing I liked least about the Olympus C70 that I was replacing.

Peter

I've been very happy with my Panasonic ZS3, which is the American name for the TZ7. The 12X zoom is nice, but it starts out at 25mm, which makes it great for wide shots as well.

I'm likely going to buy a Canon SD960 in the next few weeks. I'm just waiting to see if the price comes down as new announcements are coming this month.

From what I've read, it's somewhat typical for smaller cameras and there have certainly been some complaints, but I believe it stacks up decently well with other Elph/Ixus models.

Plus Cabel Sasser likes it. Which is actually where I first learned about this specific model.

The wide-angle and movie modes are big pluses for me with the baby on the way. This is a pocket cam to supplement my Nikon D300, not a primary camera.

One feature I've been happy with on the Sony T500 is the touchscreen interface. UI wise it could use some improvement, but for focusing, it's really handy. Just tap what you want to focus on, and the camera takes care of it. Might be a feature worth looking into for the cameras you are interested in.

The Fuji Finepix S2000HD is pretty good, but after having mine stolen I got a Canon EOS 450D and it absolutely rocks. It is a little bigger though...

You can understand why they changed the name. "ZS3" sounds so much more American than the euro-weenie sounding "TZ7".

I've got a Panasonic LX3. My requirements were something with a raw mode and decent low-light performance (both noise and autofocus). Decent wide-angle was also desirable. The LX3 does all that and more.

Downsides:

- lens cap (verus a built-in)
- only barely fits in a pocket
- lack of telephoto is occasionally annoying, but not often
- UI designed by sadistic monkeys

Really, any of the compact camera will have an awful UI, but the Panasonic really went for the jugular. You've got two switches on the body (on/off and record/playback), two more on the lens barel (AF normal/AF macro/manual focus, and aspect ratio) two separate joysticks/pads, and assorted other buttons. It's really a mess. Nonetheless, the low-light results beat out my old Nikon D70, and from such a tiny sensor.

One concern we have had with the more recent compacts we have been using has been speed. They seem to be annoyingly slow both to take the pic (autofocus, exposure?) and to save it, even with fast flash cards.

There are ways some models mitigate these issues, though there are tradeoffs. On my ZS3 at least, I can choose to have the autofocus engaged all the time, or only when I engage the shutter release. If the former, there's less delay in taking the picture, but battery life takes a hit.

Also, to make saving to the flash faster, I find it's useful to dial down the picture size to 5MP or even lower if I'm not going to make larger prints. A lot of times people just leave it at the highest setting for no good reason, and wonder why it takes longer. More data == longer flash writes ain't rocket science.

The burst modes are also helpful in this regard, keeping several pictures in memory before writing out to flash, and avoiding the autofocus delay.

But yeah, those are all workarounds, and it would be awesome if everything was faster.

Does anyone have experiences with the Canon SD960 with regard to the speed? The more recent Canons have been a disappointment in that regard.

If you want speed, then you want a real D-SLR. It's a world of difference. That said, my Panasonic LX-3 seems notably snappier than other compact cameras I've used. Still, on a good day it still takes maybe a second to get an autofocus lock. (I always, always do the half-press prefocus thing, so I can at least have some vague control over what's happening when I actually take the shot.)

Unfortunately I also want something small and cheap enough to have easily at hand in the car,

Has anyone found a point and shoot that will take continuous timed shots until you stop it ? I think it would be fun to have the camera in the car just taking pictures out the window every 60 seconds or something and see what I get.

My Kodak DC260 from 1998 did that (built-in intervalometer).

-ml

I know that there are some that can do it, or can be hacked to do it. I don't know which models but based on some work others have done, I know it's do-able: Look up Kite Photography.

Canon just announced two new "interesting" cameras: the G11 and S90. Both use a new 10MP sensor (down from the 14MP sensor in the G10, so theoretically better high-ISO performance). The S90 is also nicely pocketable and appears to have had some serious thought put into the UI, unlike the fiddly bits on the Panasonic LX3. If I was camera shopping for a compact, today, I'd probably still end up with the Panasonic, since it has a wider angle lens and has HD video (notably lacking in the Canon).

Also, with regard to camera speed, I had my LX3 in manual focus mode the other day (low light, indoors, and shooting a bunch of pictures from a fixed vantage point), and discovered that shot-to-shot performance was quite excellent, even in raw mode. Unsurprisingly, the autofocus system takes a significant amount of time, and if you're in a situation where you don't need it, you can win big. As such, maybe you just want to make sure you can find a compact camera with a manual focus option.

Look at CHDK. It works with most recent (ie less than about 5 years old) canon compact cameras, basically most of the ones that are using a DIGIC 2,3, or 4 processor. It will allow intervalometer effects, as well as a lot of other cool things. I use it for some of my aerial photography.

pca

Holy shit. I thought you might have an answer to his question, but THAT is something I'd never seen and didn't know existed until now. Wow.



Just one of an incredible host of features. It's like Hijack for the Canon cameras.

Damn, I might have to go back to one of the Canons JUST SO I CAN RUN THIS SOFTWARE. Gah.

If your choice of car is indicative of your lifestyle in general, then perhaps I could recommend one of the Olympus cameras? Shock-proof, water-proof, crush-proof and freeze-proof. Controls are reasonable, picture quality is mostly adequate, and they have idiotic policies on storage media, but it lives up to its claim on toughness.

Glad to show you something new

I use it with a couple of canon compacts, using the USB external trigger mode so I can fire it from an RC link. It's much easier than modding the camera internally to do the same thing, which is what I always had to do in the past.

The main killer app for me is RAW support, but there are so many thing you can do with it other than that. I just wish it was applicable to DSLR cameras, and Nikon ones at that Pushing my D80 to ISO 60000 would be fun.

pca

I could have sworn it had cropped up here several times, is the bot in need of some maintenance

It has.

I must have missed it then.

Canon today announced some new cameras. Of note are the S90 and the SD980 (which is now what I'm looking at getting instead of the SD960 - which will itself likely drop in price very soon).

I can vouch for Olympus being tough. I have a 740 and it get's beat to heck because I hate using a case. My wife has a Canon of silimar spec and many times the pictures are better from it but the olympus looks plenty good. The xdcard media is only slightly annoying they are the same price as SD cards so it's not too big of a deal.

I bit the bullet and bought the SD960 after finding out the SD980 won't be out until sometime in October. That's too long in baby-time to not have a compact around for shooting snaps and some video.

With any luck I can resell the SD960 without losing much money in a few months if I decide to move to something else like the SD980 (wider and longer lens). I bought it for US$248 all-in which is pretty decent.

It's too bad that firmware hack seems to only be supported on older Canon cameras so far. None of the compacts released this year seem to have versions for them. I very much wanted to try some intervalometer shooting from a Kite this year before winter comes around.

Let us know how you like it, and especially how slow it is.

Ken Rockwell seems to like it. Look at his posts from August 14 to August 20th. It's not his top choice for a compact (which doesn't really matter to me), but you can see it takes some nice pictures in his travel examples.

New! Panasonic just announced the GF1. It's got interchangeable lenses, yet it's small enough to be pocketable. Unlike the Olympus E-P1, it has a built-in flash and it also has autofocus that has DPReview gushing about how it's as fast as a D-SLR. DPReview has only posted a preview, at this point, so no measurements yet.

Rumormill: Leica appears to have some new cameras on the way, including an "X1" which is likely to share guts with the above Panasonic but appears to have a more traditional user interface, versus the gadget astronaut design of the Panasonic. Very interesting.

That GF1 looks awesome. It would be even more awesome if they had a flush-mount lens for it to convert it into a really pocketable solution, so as to have a single camera for snapshots and SLR shots.

That is, all of that seems great until you see the price: $900.

There's just enough time to mortgage the house in anticipation of the new Leica models.

Once you put a monster lens on The new Panasonic, what's the advantage of the body being so small? Yes, I suppose new lenses using the new "Micro 4/3" standard will be smaller. But changing lenses on any camera sucks, and on a small camera it's likely most people would want to stick with a single more versatile lens.

Then you also add a significant bulk with the optional viewfinder. The body itself doesn't seem that small in the sample hand-holding images at DPReview either.

It might make an interesting alternative to the Canon G series for some people, but I think this is going to be an ultra-niche product. I also can't respect a press release without a price. Bad show Panasonic, bad.

They do have a "pancake lens" that's small enough. The camera is still too large for most pockets, but it would fit nicely in a variety of belt clip holsters. I don't believe Panasonic has announced prices yet, but its closest competitor, the Olympus E-P1 is selling for $800. The earlier Panasonic G1 is selling for around $640, which is where I bet the GF1 will be around Christmas.

Just keep in mind: this isn't meant to compete with pocket cameras. It's meant to compete with big D-SLRs. From that perspective, it's pretty small!

Yeah, that 20mm lens is small, but I really meant one that would sit within the body housing, or damned close to it, maybe even a collapsible lens body. I think there's a market for people who would like to have both styles of camera without needing two separate cameras, which is what this seems to be. I just think they need to figure out a way to go one step further.

Regardless, I'm in that (probably niche) market, but I would like to see the price be significantly lower.

If you want the lens entirely inside the body, then you're looking at a different class of camera, something like a Canon G10. Any interchangeable lens camera is fundamentally going to have the lens (or at least most of it) hanging out. You even see that with the Panasonic LX3, where they even require you to have a lens cap, since they couldn't shoehorn one in and still have the fancy optics they wanted.

Personally, my solution is to have a compact camera that mostly fits in my pocket (the Panasonic LX3) and another one that's heavy and does everything I could ever want (the Nikon D700). If you insist on having something small and you want the flexibility of a SLR, then this new Panasonic or the almost-equivalent Olympus are the best game in town.

Ken Rockwell just posted a little review of the new Canon SD980is.

If you read past his hyperbole and sometimes tongue-in-cheek comments, you'll see that this little camera can take some outstanding shots.

The 980 is the camera I couldn't wait for, mentioned previously. The 960 which I did buy has been doing pretty well. Haven't had much opportunity to use it yet, but the few shots and movies we did make last weekend were much more than acceptable. It needs a little study time to find where all the settings are made in its menus and then some practice time in lower light situations.

Powershot G11 looks promising.
Here is a specs comparison with the G10.

The G11 looks quite awesome and could make a fine replacement for an SLR during the times you don't want to carry as much kit. Especially since you can still do a lot of stuff with external strobes - if you're into that sort of thing.

It's on my radar for a non-pocket (but small) camera.

I agree on that, and that's one of the reasons I am considering buying one when it gets released and tested by dpreview.com and/or others.
But, I also found, after trying my friend's G10, that to many, including me, it is also a goor replacement for a compact camera. It is small enough to fit in most bags, glove compartments, etc, and Canon makes a simple belt leather case for it, just like for my current Ixus 950IS; in the end, that's how I always carry it when travelling.
Clearly, this is highly subjective. In any case, my two-year-old Ixus 950IS, which I liked overall, is on sale on ebay.