Which digicam should i buy?
A few days ago i came up with the idea of replacing my several years old canon digital ixus 30 with something newer and better. Maybe with a more recent canon ixus (called elph SD+somenumber outside europe), heres a summary of what ive found that has changed:
| noise at same ISO? | well iam not sure if it improved a little or not, the test images in various digicam tests on the web arent easy to compare due to different resolutions and likely different noise reduction used by the cameras … |
|---|---|
| ISOs | the recent ixus/elphs suport 800 and 1600 which is nice though somewhat noisy, OTOH they lost 50 support which is a pitty and i cant help but wonder why noone has hacked the damn crap to support any ISO. Or has someone? |
| manual controls | no, still not, we need to wait another 10years for canon to remove that #ifndef ELPH in their source code |
| wide angle | 28-105mm on the SD800 and SD870 instead of 35-105mm which is nice but id be more happy if they had 18-55mm or something in that area |
| max aperture | no still at f2.8 and thats the same for all compact cameras i found |
| weight | seems to have gotten worse … |
| Really important things | Face detection, yes really everyone dreamed of it and wanted it now finally we have it in every new camera ;) but seriously wtf. Is the industry totally insane? What is this nonsense good for … if at least it would recognize people and depending on who it is focus on something else :) then it might be usefull but … Just remember the user of the camera knows what he wants to focus on, the camera does not and cannot, the user might even want to focus on different things in the same situation depending on his mood its not something a camera or another human can guess |
So seems like 3 years isnt enough for canon to improve their (ultra) compact cameras. What about the powershot A series? well i had the A95 for a week but it was simply way too heavy and big also its light sensitivity was not any better than the much smaller canon ixus IIRC. Though at least it had manual controls so the camera did what i wanted. And the fuji F30/F31fd? Well fuji stoped producing them and their replacment the F50fd produces vertical stripes with a nice green magenta gradient over its images, making high ISO unuseable without some cleanup. (noise is one thing but stripes even if they are fainter than the noise just isnt something i want in my images) Also the f50fd is noisier than the f31fd though still significantly less noisy then anything produced by its competitors in that size and weight range that i found.
So suggestions welcome, but it looks like i wont buy any new camera. Capitalism has once again demonstrated that it doesnt work, its not as if the consumer would know which product is best and would thus force the industry to produce better products, its rather that the industry prints irrelevant numbers (megapixels) on the cameras and the consumer buys based on that ignoring all relevant parameters. So the industry just needs to exchange the CCD with one with more megapixels and paint the camera differently instead of improving anything relevant.