The Hunt for a Compact Digital Camera

This last week I got it in my head that I wanted a new digital camera. I HAD one up until some time this year when the battery compartment door busted off which rendered it useless (it was getting a bit old as well). My wife was the one who used it mostly because the camera I had bough her many years ago didn't work as well. So she replaced it by buying herself a Canon Powershot G9 - about the most awesomely equipped compact digital camera on the market at present. I have secretly wanted to get myself a camera to replace the one that was "mine" before but this time I wanted one that could fit in my pocket and didn't require standard AA batteries. So here's how that went.

I had a few parameters to start off. I didn't want an Olympus because I previously owned two of those and I hadn't been too impressed with them - like, ever. I knew that I wanted a camera that came with a rechargeable battery so that I wouldn't have to worry about keeping spare AA's around. Before my wife purchased her G9 I thought that AA's were the way to go but after seeing how easy the rechargeable battery made things I came around. One final parameter was that I wanted something on the smaller side and for sure under $300. Seeing as how I don't carry a purse - and I don't like to carry things in general - it would be preferable for me to be able to keep my camera in my pocket when we are out.

I started my search on Amazon. Amazon is an amazing resource for a consumer even if you don't intend to buy through them. They have loads of products listed and the customer review database is very helpful - but at the same time I know very well that what annoys one person about a camera might not bother someone else. A lot of the reviews on there are not helpful in that regard. Some of them might read, "the mode selection dial sucks. don't buy this camera." Wow! Thanks!

With all of the products to choose from on Amazon, however, it was easy to get discouraged so I searched out digital camera review sites. I found two sites which were EXTREMELY helpful: dpreview.com and photographyblog.com. Each of these sites review cameras with consistent tests and in a very thorough way. Dpreview.com is more thorough than the other, but photographyblog.com still does a very good job. These sites tell you everything about the camera, its performance, its speed in taking pictures, the ergonomics of the design, the feel of the controls, how it does in all lighting conditions and basically anything else you could ever want to know. The reviews are so good, in fact, that they almost tell you more about operating the camera than the supplied owner's manual. They also include galleries of sample images taken with the camera in different situations. Most shots are outdoors but they usually include some indoor shots as well. They show you the macro performance as well as the full tele end of the lens.

These sites don't review EVERY camera on the market, however, so I had to use a combination of those sites and Amazon. What I did was I'd look up a manufacturer on Amazon and look for cameras in my price range. Then I'd try to find reviews of those cameras on my two review sites. I'd read the review from start to finish and then I'd go back to Amazon and find the user reviews where I'd start from the 1-star reviews and work up to the 5-star reviews. The 5-star reviews are almost always people who wrote a review THE DAY THEY RECEIVED THE CAMERA IN THE MAIL. Most of them say something like, "OMG THIS CAMERA IS THE BEST IT TAKES AMAZING PICTURES ALL THE PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE ___ FEATURE ARE JUST BEING LAME BUY IT BUY IT". Not very constructive. If you go to the 1-star ratings you find some people who were just annoyed by a simple feature (or a missing feature) but the rest of them can be quite revealing about the camera's long-term performance or common manufacturing flaws that people have encountered. It was though this method of reading reviews that I learned of the Canon Powershots's lens error problem. Many people reported that their camera was working fine until one day they fired it up, got the lens error and then the camera was rendered useless. To make matters worse the distributors deflected people's complaints to Canon and Canon didn't want to do anything about it saying it was not covered. Most people mentioned that it would cost about $150 to repair. One of the sites linked from the Google search I provided showed a list of cameras known to have the issue and it was practically the ENTIRE Powershot line (excluding the G9 - thankfully). So even though I had read reviews and decided that the Canon Powershot SD870IS looked like the camera for me, I couldn't buy the thing because of this issue I read about. Thank you Amazon!

After much reading I focused in on the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5. It's a new model that sports a 10x optical zoom lens (amazing for a compact) plus the Panasonic system provides some cool automatic shooting features such as a mode that can automatically detect what it is you are trying to do (portrait, macro, landscape, night scene and so on) and selects the appropriate mode, shutter, apeture and ISO for you. It can also shoot in 16:9 (which actually gives you a slightly wider field of view) as well as shoot HD 16:9 video. Pretty slick! Combined with the cool looks and great reviews (photographyblog.com rated it as one of the best compact digitals in its price range) I was pretty much sold. I went up to Fry's Electronics and scored one along with a 2 GB SD memory card (those sell for $11 now). The next day I gave it a real good testing. I took about 200 photos with it before downloading them to my computer and that was when I learned that there was a whole area of importance for finding the right compact digital that I didn't even consider: noise reduction.

Noise reduction is a serious, serious thing to examine before buying a compact digital. Compact digital cameras use very small image sensors compared to those found in the full sized SLR cameras. The more these tiny sensors are packed with megapixel resolution - the WORSE the image quality at higher ISO settings. At least that's true of sensors going past 7 or 8 megapixels. Since all digital cameras have to deal with this then the quality of the photos taken by the camera at anything other than the base ISO (usually around 100) is going to depend largely on the noise reduction algorithms used by the manufacturer and the amount they are applied. The more noise reduction applied, the less remaining detail in the shot. Panasonic's noise reduction is the ugliest thing I have ever seen, but to make things worse, it applies that noise reduction not only to correct noise at higher ISOs but also to anything in your photo that isn't in focus. So if you take a picture of something close, as in a macro shot, with remaining depth to the picture that would be out of focus then the out of focus part of the image would look blurred but smeared as well. Instead of a natural blur, Panasonic smudges things as if they merge adjacent pixels in the photo to eliminate the grainy noise. Water-color paintings come to mind, in fact. It's terrible and since it is applied even to pictures in perfect light taken at the base ISO it means that you cannot have a good picture from their cameras.

Needless to say, my search wasn't over. Friday night I spent another couple of hours reading reviews about cameras. It's amazing how much more complicated things get when you take the noise reduction quality into account along with all of those other parameters I had (rechargeable battery, pocket sized and so on). It's a good thing that I didn't require manual control such as apeture and shutter priority or else I'd only have about 3 cameras to choose from. Since I had already purchased an SD memory card I also wanted to find one that accepted the same memory so that scratched Sony and Olypmus from the list straight away. The lens error issue with the Canons was a problem so I decided to read up on the Nikon line. The worst complaint that I could find about those was that they aren't as fast as other cameras in their price range which isn't too bad of a complaint. Either that or it was people who had purchased a new model to upgrade from an older model and they found that it wasn't worth it. Unfortunately there weren't many of their cameras reviewed on my two review resource sites so I was only really able to read about the COOLPIX P5100, P60 and P50. The P5100 is really what sounded like "my" camera - though it was harshly criticized for having unintuitive controls as well as being VERY slow. One of the slowest features was the shot to shot time using red-eye reduction flash: 6+ seconds! That's a long time when compared to my wife's G9 which can do the same thing in under 3 seconds. Regardless, this sounded like the right camera even though it was a little over my price range - but isn't that how it works? So today (Saturday) I packed up the Panasonic and headed to Fry's to return it and to try out the Canon SD870IS (I was still considering it) and the Nikon P5100 as well as the P60 if it was around.

The return went fine (no restocking fees at Fry's) and I was off to play with the cameras. The first thing I noticed was that they don't even carry Nikon! Dang. So I played around with the Canon SD870 and just as I had read in one of the reviews, the touch-sensitive selection dial is a real pisser. This dial is supposed to work like the main control on an iPod - it's touch sensitive and it functions like a dial but also provides 4-way directional control. This control is FAR from perfected. As pretty much every digital camera provides, the 4-way "hat" switch has shortcuts for flash, macro and timer shooting. The touch sensitive dial is supposed to "spin" through an on-screen dial display of shooting modes. The problem here is that the dial requires a certain amount of pressure to register that you are trying to use the dial but it's so close to the amount of pressure required to press one of the 4-way "hat" buttons that as you spin the dial you suddenly change the flash setting or put the camera into macro mode. To make matters worse, I found that the dial is VERY picky about the pressure applied to register that you are trying to use it which made things a real mess if I went past what I wanted to select and tried to back up. It was just really crappy and not user friendly. Unfortunately EVERY one of their cameras in the SD line above the 700 number have this control. The full line of Canon Powershot "A" models are powered by standard AA batteries so they were completely out of the question even if thought they had nice controls and the take good pictures. So that was that for the Canons and I left Fry's empty-handed for Best Buy.

Best Buy has Nikons but they don't have any of the models I was looking to play with. What they did have was the COOLPIX S600 which I immediately started to tinker with. This VERY compact camera is also very sexy looking with a slate grey brushed metal looking exterior, a large LCD screen on the back and well placed controls. Did I mention it as small? This thing is SMALL as in smaller than a deck of playing cards. I knew from reading about the Nikon cameras that their noise reduction was minimal and images still retain good detail even at ISO of 800 (with good lighting at least). I also knew that the photos taken on a Nikon generally require more touch-up (color boost and/or sharpening) than other cameras so the images might have a lack of punch to them straight out of the camera. I like to do a bit of post production to images so Nikon's approach to note editing the images too much in-camera is acceptable to me. The only thing I didn't like about the camera is it's dial-wheel (doubles as the 4-way "hat" switch). It was loose and cheap feeling but I thought that it might be because it was a display model. The S600 was also on sale - so that was that. I picked one up and brough it home.

Between my wife and I, we've take maybe 50 pictures with it around the house and the yard and so far it's perfect for me. The shooting modes are easily selectable, the auto-focus area has nice options such as auto (where it guesses what to focus on), center (fixed focus area in the center of the frame), manual (allows you to manually move it around the screen so you can frame shots where the subject of the photo is in a specific shot - nice feature for someone that likes to get a little creative), and finally the auto face detection which can focus on up to 12 faces at a time. Oh, the dial is tighter than that display model's too - like I thought.

I put up a couple of images from the Nikon in a new photo gallery called Playground. The first two in the gallery, the close-ups of the blue-purple flowers, are from the Nikon while the rest are from the Panasonic. All of the images have some post production but nothing exotic. Just auto contrast/color balancing and some of them have been sharpened using the unsharp mask tool in my editing program. All single-click adjustments that took only a couple of seconds.

I'm going to take as many pictures as I can and post as many of them as are decent (probably a small percentage) so keep an eye out! And remember, when you head out to find a new camera be ready to buy one or two and find out that you made the wrong purchase so make sure where you doesn't have restocking fees (don't go to Best Buy). I'll try to remember to post up a long-term review of the camera after a month or so. If I forget, though, don't hold it against me.