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More Camera, More Style, Modest Price
Correction Appended
As you grow older, you begin to ponder the eternal questions. What is the meaning of life? What happens to our souls after death? And how much digital camera can you get for $300?
All right, that last question isn’t so much an eternal question as an annual one. I’ve been asking it in this column every year since 2001. And the answer is always the same: a lot more than last year.
This year, 11 companies submitted their best cameras with a street price under $300. The contenders are the Canon A630, the Casio Exilim Zoom EX-Z700, the Fuji FinePix F30, the Hewlett-Packard Photosmart R827, the Kodak EasyShare C875, the Nikon Coolpix S7c, the Olympus Stylus 740, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX3, the Pentax Optio A20, the Samsung Digimax NV3 and the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-W100.
Seven of these cameras cost about $250 or less. Two (from Panasonic and Kodak) are so close to $200, they’re practically impulse buys. You can spend the leftover money on a memory card (not included).
These are shirt-pocket cameras, consumery and sweet-looking. They’ll never rival the astonishing, National Geographic-class photos taken by the much bulkier digital S.L.R. cameras, which continue to plummet in price. ( Nikon’s new D40 costs $600, complete with lens.)
But even professionals often pack a little cam just in case — or, rather, in pocket. Here’s what’s new in the budget cams of 2006.
LOOKS A couple of weeks ago, I asked a camera manager for Circuit City in Manhattan what people want most in a camera these days.
His answer: “Basically, style.” He told me that most shoppers are more interested in a camera’s looks than in its picture quality.
Ah, well. There’s plenty of style on display in the $300 gang. Nikon’s sleek S7c is dressed in metallic gray with chrome accents. Its three-inch screen — the largest in the group — makes a huge difference in framing and displaying your photos.
Samsung’s NV3 also turns heads. Its nearly featureless front is matte-black metal. With its sky-blue accents and rounded sides, it’s a thing of wonder, if not beauty.
On both of these cameras, the zoom lens is entirely internal, rather than telescoping outward; a prism bends the light. The result is a slimmer, sleeker body (the camera’s, not yours).
SPEED Shutter lag is still a problem on inexpensive cameras. Unless you prefocus by half-pressing the shutter button, you miss shots because of the half-second the camera takes to focus.
Some companies have invested in faster circuitry on their little cameras, but you won’t find it in this price range. (Canon’s SD800 IS is especially fast, but it costs about $360.)
LOW LIGHT Low-light shots remain the Achilles’ heels of inexpensive cams. Tiny cameras have tiny sensors, measuring about half an inch across or even less, and they just don’t soak up much light.
Some cameras, like the Kodak, just say: “Hey, it’s dark in here,” and deliver a dark photo. Most of the others automatically bump up the light sensitivity (ISO setting), resulting in horrifying grain. Only the Fuji has been designed from the beginning to excel in low light without the flash.
STABILIZER Let’s face it: blur happens. In low light, the shutter stays open longer to absorb enough light, and is therefore susceptible to tiny hand shakes. Zooming in or shooting while moving magnify motion blur.
So the big news in 2006 cameras was image stabilization. Real optical image stabilizers work amazingly well; they jiggle the lens or the sensor to counter camera movement.
In this roundup, all companies but Canon and Sony claim some kind of antiblur technology. But in fact, only the Pentax and the Panasonic offer a true mechanical stabilizer. All the others just bump up the ISO or apply antiblur software.
Yes, blurry photos are still part of life with the low-priced cams.
MEGAPIXELS All of these cameras offer six- to eight-megapixel resolution except the Pentax, which claims 10; anything over five is plenty for making even poster-size prints. No matter what the manufacturers imply, the megapixel count has zero effect on picture quality. More megapixels means more freedom to crop your photos before printing, but also means that your memory card and hard drive fill up a lot faster.
BATTERY Little cameras mean little batteries. Most of these mini-cams manage fewer than 200 shots a charge (compare that with as many as 2,500 on a digital S.L.R.). The Pentax is particularly feeble (150 shots); the Canon and Fuji are particularly impressive (500).
Of course, it’s easy to see why the Canon gets away with such great battery life: it’s a big, honking machine that holds four AA-size batteries, preferably rechargeable. The Kodak also takes AA-size. Those AA’s aren’t quite as convenient as the proprietary bricks found in the other cameras, of course. But in a pinch, you can duck into a drugstore to buy more.
MOVIE MODE Digital cameras are getting better and better at shooting movies. All of this year’s models can take movies that fill your TV screen (640 by 480). All but the Olympus and H. P. can do so at TV smoothness (30 frames a second).
A few cameras (Kodak, H. P., Samsung, Nikon) even offer true optical zoom while filming, although you may hear the lens zooming on the soundtrack. The Samsung even lets you pause and then resume, like a real camcorder, even within a single movie clip.
OPTICAL VIEWFINDER Eyepiece viewfinders are disappearing; in this group, only the Canon and Sony still have them. The others require you to use the screen for framing your photos — but the screen may fade in bright sun, may turn black in dim light, and eats up battery power. Rally the bloggers! Save the optical viewfinder!
NEXT-GEN FEATURES Except as noted here, the cameras in this class are all pretty much alike. They’re all silver, all about the same size, with a 3X zoom and pretty much the same set of features. Here and there, though, you can see a manufacturer going for something fresh.
Nikon’s S7c, for example, has a Wi-Fi transmitter; in a wireless hot spot, you can send your photos directly to any e-mail address. The process is extremely straightforward. Dialing in the letters of an e-mail address using the tiny thumb ring dial is tedious, but at least the camera remembers the addresses once you input them. The camera includes a free year of photo-sending at T-Mobile hot spots.
Samsung’s NV3 is even more radical. It aspires to be a video iPod, capable of playing music, showing photos and even movies. It’s a tad limited; it accepts only unprotected music files (nothing bought online), and you have to convert your videos into a special format using buggy software that’s provided for Windows only. You get about two hours of movie playback per charge.
PICTURE QUALITY O.K., so maybe the public has spoken. Maybe it has said, “We care how the camera looks, not the pictures.”
But if you’re among the few, the proud, who still care about the quality of the photos, here’s the story.
The photo-quality winner is the big, homely Canon A630. Not only are its colors the truest and its details the sharpest, but it has more photographic features than any other model (optical viewfinder, autofocus lamp, manual controls, and a tie for biggest sensor). It also has the only 4X zoom in this roundup, plus the only flip-out, rotating screen that lets you shoot over people’s heads or below waist level.
Fuji’s FinePix F30 tied for first place last year, which tells you something: in digital camera years, it’s getting old. But this camera still leads the pack in low light — even candlelight shots look clear and beautiful — and its everyday shots rarely disappoint.
The Kodak, Sony and Panasonic also perform well — and they’re more consistently satisfying than the rest of the pack, where digital grain, softness of details and cameraphonish colors sometimes creep in. The cheap-feeling H. P. and the splash-resistant Olympus are actually capable of taking grainy shots even in broad daylight.
Now that you know what’s in store, you’re ready to confront another eternal question: How long before the camera I buy will be obsolete?
