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.
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.
Well I have the A710, the default light sensitivity give strange result. I often should correct them with manual control.
A710 is also a bit big.
Comment by mat — 2007-09-23 @ 08:53
Whatever you choose, I look forward to more frog pictures.
Comment by Multimedia Mike — 2007-09-24 @ 17:33
Talking about “light sensitivity at same ISO” just doesn’t make sense; the light sensitivity is defined by the ISO value. The interesting metric is noise at any given ISO value. (Actually, talking about “ISO value” is senseless too…)
It should be noted that practically all compact cameras use the same Sony CCD sensors, so only the pixel count really matters.
Here’s my advice for buying a compact camera:
– Look for the lowest possible pixel count. Less than 6M is hard to find these days.
– Optics: check sharpness, chromatic aberration, and linearity. These generally get worse with longer zoom ranges.
– Controls: manual controls are good. Unfortunately even semi-automatic, let alone manual, is rare on the most compact models.
– Image stabilization is nice if available.
– Gimmicks such as face detection and various effects come far down on the priority list.
These parameters should of course be evaluated within the acceptable size and price ranges.
I’m afraid there are no really good compact cameras to be found. The megapixel race has turned them all into little more than random number generators. Anyone half-serious about photography would do well to consider a DSLR instead. The Canon 400D gives good value for money and is compatible with Canon’s entire range of lenses. The downside is that carrying a kilogram of camera is not always an option.
Comment by Mans — 2007-09-24 @ 19:08
> Talking about “light sensitivity at same ISO†just doesn’t make sense; the light sensitivity
> is defined by the ISO value. The interesting metric is noise at any given ISO value.
true, thats what i meant, ill fix that
> It should be noted that practically all compact cameras use the same Sony CCD sensors,
> so only the pixel count really matters.
at least fuji uses its own CCDs AFAIK
> Here’s my advice for buying a compact camera:
> – Look for the lowest possible pixel count. Less than 6M is hard to find these days.
i think its rather lowest pixel count per CCD area which matters noise wise, though pixel count on its own has relevance as well, wasting cpu time, memory and battery
[…]
> I’m afraid there are no really good compact cameras to be found. The megapixel race has
> turned them all into little more than random number generators. Anyone half-serious about
> photography would do well to consider a DSLR instead. The Canon 400D gives good value for
> money and is compatible with Canon’s entire range of lenses. The downside is that carrying a
> kilogram of camera is not always an option.
btw, whats your oppinion about analog rangefinder cameras? yes they are neither in my price nor weight range, iam just curious …
Comment by Michael — 2007-09-25 @ 02:58
Hi,
what about the Canon Powershot TX1? It’s not regularly available in europe but in ebay from Hong Kong.
It has the important option of making excellent movies in bright scenes. They are in no way comparable to any other compact digicam »movies«.
BTW the resulting 4:2:2 MJPEGs are a good source for testing material for snow developement ;-)
More info: http://powershot-tx1.blogspot.com/
Lars
Comment by Lars — 2007-09-25 @ 15:46
> at least fuji uses its own CCDs AFAIK
Some Fujifilm models were part of a massive recall triggered by a fault in Sony CCD chips a couple of years ago, so at least some of their models use(d) Sony sensors. That said, there’s no reason to avoid Sony sensors in general. Apart from a few mishaps like that one they seem to be performing adequately.
> i think its rather lowest pixel count per CCD area which matters noise wise
Yes, it’s the pixel size that matters. However, all compact cameras seem to use 1/1.8″ sensors, so comparing the pixel counts is good enough.
> btw, whats your oppinion about analog rangefinder cameras?
The only rangefinder I’ve used to any significant degree was an old Olympys from ~1970. It was very easy to focus, but the viewfinder was annoyingly small and the difference between viewfinder and actual image had to be taken into account. I don’t really have a strong opinion on rangefinder cameras in general.
Comment by Mans — 2007-09-25 @ 19:29
> Yes, it’s the pixel size that matters. However, all compact cameras seem to use 1/1.8″ sensors,
> so comparing the pixel counts is good enough.
as iam comparing them a little currently, i know thats not true, the canon A710 IS, A720, SD850 IS, SD870 IS, SD1000 all use 1/2.5 the SD950 IS uses a 1/1.7 but that one has 12MP
fujis F31fd used 1/1.7 with 6MP but its no longer produced, fujis F50fd has a 1/1.6 with 12mp
(numbers copied from my notes which are from various reviews from the web …)
Comment by Michael — 2007-09-26 @ 00:59
BTW about megapixels, I’m largely convinced they don’t even upgrade the CCD but just add more interpolation points. Have you ever tried analyzing the images taken by various cameras to identify the maximum frequency bands that actually contain content? Should be a fun experiment…
I’ve never done it mathematically, but at a glance my 3.2 megapixel camera seems to be more like 1.2 megapixel in terms of actual information-content in the pictures it takes. It has a “smart digital zoom” that supposedly switches to higher resolution w/cropping instead of doing upsampling, but the result looks suspiciously like upsampling to the point that I think all modes above 1280×960 are just upsampled.
FYI my camera is a Sony DSC-P72.
Comment by Rich — 2007-10-24 @ 11:39
> BTW about megapixels, I’m largely convinced they don’t even upgrade the CCD but just add more
> interpolation points. Have you ever tried analyzing the images taken by various cameras to
> identify the maximum frequency bands that actually contain content? Should be a fun
> experiment…
if that where the case then they wouldnt get so much noisier with more megapixels, the f50 is at least twice as noisy as the f31. if they had the same CCD that wouldnt be the case, also you can look at the various reviews on the web many contain tests for the resolution …
i cant test the f50fd anymore as its back where it came from …
> I’ve never done it mathematically, but at a glance my 3.2 megapixel camera seems to be more
> like 1.2 megapixel in terms of actual information-content in the pictures it takes.
a N megapixel camera has a CCD which records N scalar samples (thats true for at least anything you can buy in a shop AFAIK), that is one color for each pixel, so your guess is quite close :)
to make a normal 3 sample RGB or YUV image out of that requires 2/3 of the data to be made out of hot air, some cameras are better at that some are worse. if your camera supports raw output (i doubt it …) then see dcraw
Comment by Michael — 2007-10-25 @ 02:08
> if that where the case then they wouldnt get so much noisier with more megapixels, the f50 is at
> least twice as noisy as the f31. if they had the same CCD that wouldnt be the case, also you can
> look at the various reviews on the web many contain tests for the resolution …
> i cant test the f50fd anymore as its back where it came from …
and with twice as noisy i mean of course after the f50 image is scaled down to the same resolution as the f31 one
Comment by Michael — 2007-10-25 @ 02:11
Thanks for the explanation of their bogus idea of pixels, Michael. Now I’ll know to just leave my camera on 1280×960 mode since beyond that it’ll just be making up samples to waste disk space. :)
Comment by Rich — 2007-10-25 @ 05:53
Well that depends, if for example you take an image of something grayscale (or something with constant chroma) then by r=b=g (or r/b=C0 r/g=C1) your camera could in principle build a much higher resolution image. also chroma does not change nearly as much as luma in natural images so downscaling to 1/3 the pixels and compressing to jpeg does not seem like the best thing to do to me.
Ideally of course all digi cams would have 3CCD sensors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3CCD) but AFAIK there is no digicam which does use these, not even leicas do, i wish it were different, a 3CCD digicam would be a real improvement over the crap available today
Comment by Michael — 2007-10-31 @ 01:06