Anyone know of a good digital camera?
This is my current camera. It was decently customizable and had a lot of convenient scene modes, but it's no longer in production so you probably won't be buying it. This is why it stinks:
- The lens aren't great. There's visible darkening around the corners in wide-angle shots. While it looks dramatic and stuff... really, no thanks.
- Pictures are hella noisy. Even in bright pictures; where there's a shadow, there is noise. And don't get me started on the craziness of low-light pictures.
- It's rather big and heavy. Of course, it's nowhere near the size and weight of an SLR, but I'd rather have a camera that fits in a pocket or something.
- It's SLOW! 4.5 seconds to turn on and something like 3 seconds between pictures. It sure lets "Kodak moments" slip by, despite actually BEING a Kodak.
So here are the features I REALLY WANT, in order of importance:
- IMAGE QUALITY. Whether it's a good lens, good processing chip, image stabilization, or a combo of all/any of the above. I'd like to not have to mess with a million settings in Photoshop for half the pictures I take (which I really SHOULD do now, but am usually too lazy to). Low light image quality is important to me, since I take a lot of shots at night and indoors.
- Must be fast. I'd like it to turn on in less than 2 seconds... same for time between shots.
- Durability. I'm pretty damned clumsy.
- Manual settings. Because automatic settings just can't beat my own adjustments, sometimes. And I might want to do the occasional artsy long exposure or something...
- Small size. So I can smuggle it into concerts... Ohoho.
- Good features! Picture modes and such... even more important if the camera has limited manual capabilities.
- Video with SOUND. I do take occasional video clips with my camera. They don't have to be great quality, but I'd like there to be sound.
So here are the cameras I've looked at so far and how they faired with the above categories:
Casio Exilim EX-Z750 --
The good: It's small, it has TONS OF MANUAL OPTIONS (manual FOCUS on an ultracompact? Freaking awesome), tons of scene modes, all metal, strong flash (for its size), good-looking pictures (though overexposed... I have that problem now so I can deal/fix), real viewfinder, lots of on-camera features I might not even use (perspective correction? I might leave that to Photoshop), CRAZY long battery life.
The bad: not the greatest lens, video quality is not good (about the same as what I get now), barrel distortion (though I'm not picky about this).
Canon PowerShot SD450 --
The good: Canon has a pretty good processing chip, real viewfinder, lots of features (a lot of which I will never use), great macro mode (I use this quite a lot), good-looking flash portraits, cheapest one here.
The bad: No manual mode (though there are some other manual adjustments), weird white balance (instead of fixing the orangeness of incandescent shots, Canon claims they want to give those shots that cozy nostalgic feel), strong "color fringing" on bright/overexposed areas (one of my peeves >_<).
Panasonic DMC-FX01 --
The good: wiiiide angle lens with 3.6x optical zoom (the best you can get on a camera of this size... it takes 10% more picture than the averge 35mm lens), image stabilization system, AMAZING movie quality (including 16:9 wide mode), lovely metal body.
The bad: no viewfinder (so I can't take secretive ninja shots, what with that bigass LCD glowing away), its older brothers have had spontaneous LCD cracking issues (I don't know if Panasonic has fixed it), Panasonic's digital cameras tend to have overaggressive image-sharpening, it ain't cheap.
Fujifilm FinePix F10 --
The good: AMAZING image quality due to the SuperCCD sensor (basically the gold standard for image quality in the compact point-and-shoot category... comparable to some digital SLRs!), and um... did I mention the IMAGE QUALITY??
The bad: No one likes the menu navigation :<, not much manual adjustment possible, no real view finder, bigger than I would like, stupid dongle needed... but I would SO live with the bad things for the image quality (I'll freaking drag out the old Nikon SLR for some manual control fun >W<;;).
And the Fujifilm FinePix F30 is coming out the end of this month. It will have HELLA BEAST low-light features... in fact, I am already drooling. Boo for the $400 price tag!
There's also Sony cameras, which are easily some of the smallest and most stylish... Sony also has a new and apparently good image processing chip out (or something... Canon apparently uses it on some of their cameras). My main gripe with Sony is their use of their proprietary Memory Stick (and now their new Memory Stick Duo business). I already have three different digital cameras that use three different storage formats, so I'd REALLY like to stick with SD or CompactFlash for this next camera.
I should probably also check out some Nikons because... well, they just make good cameras (my old 3.1mp Nikon Coolpix still turns out better low-light shots than the newer Kodak... even after parts of it have spontaneously broken and fixed themselves).
And now that THAT is off my chest, I hope I can now FINALLY get to work!
I keep updating this as I find more cameras and stuff... arrgh!