Despite the rise of camera phones, the digital camera is still an essential for any traveller, yet buying one can be an absolute nightmare. Much like mobile phones, manufacturers seem to launch a new product every few months, with a dizzying array of features from megapixels to light sensitivity.
In recent months the market has also fragmented, so buying a camera really depends on what you want to use it for. The average holiday snapper who isn’t that interested in the settings on their camera will be perfectly happy with a compact digital camera (of which there are hundreds to choose from).
There’s also the zoom compact market, which gives you a great tool for safaris and other trips where you might not want to get too close to the subject you’re photographing. But if you fancy yourself as a more talented amateur, in the last 18 months a whole new breed of camera has emerged – the “prosumer”. Despite the terrible name these are basically professional cameras, but watered down slightly for the consumer market. Crucially, they usually come with a decent auto feature, so don’t worry too much about having to adjust settings
for every picture.
To add even more confusion, camera phones are slowly getting closer to dedicated cameras in terms of picture quality. Cameras are also one of the most discounted products out there, so it’s well worth using a comparative shopping tool such as Google’s “Froogle” search engine (just click on “products” on Google’s homepage). And if you plan on buying one abroad, it’s well worth double-checking warranties and power supplies, as both can cause you a nightmare if something goes wrong.
COMPACT CAMERA
Fujifilm Fine Pix Z100fd
£219
fujifilm.com
Fujifilm’s latest high-end compact camera boasts an 8-megapixel resolution, 5x optical zoom and a host of features, making this a serious contender for the ultimate take-anywhere camera. It also looks pretty good, which does help, and the lens cover is really well designed to slide diagonally across the camera to reveal the lens and its accompanying sensors. The 2.7-inch screen is really sharp and bright, and will even show tiny previews of up to 100 pictures on-screen if you need it to.
The menu system is good, but far from perfect. It can be a little confusing and overly busy at times, but after a few minutes we found we were only really using it to change between shooting modes anyway. There’s a good selection of modes – from museum to landscape – with images to illustrate each one.
There is also a particularly useful face-detection system built-in, which means the camera will automatically find faces within the picture and make sure they are in focus. This is a feature which we found works incredibly
well. It will also automatically take red-eye from pictures, and is very good at stabilising shaky hands to give you clear, sharp pictures.
The Fujifilm is surprisingly hardy. We tested it over a long weekend in Iceland and it endured everything from sub-zero temperatures on a whale-watching trip (where the image stabilising features also performed well in shivering hands), to hot and humid conditions inside Reykjavik’s bars.
Thankfully, Fujifilm has also decided to support SD cards in this camera, whereas previously only its own proprietary format was included. This means that you probably won’t have to buy new cards if you are swapping cameras, so it will save you quite a bit of money.
The 19.8mm-thick camera is also a bit of a fashionista’s gadget, with its slick exterior and glowing indicator on the front whenever it’s on. But beneath the surface there is a really good all-round unit. It’s not outstanding in any one area, but it will make a good job of pretty much any condition you throw at it – this really is a camera you can leave in your travel bag and always trust to be up to the job.
PROS Great all-rounder.
CONS Menu system is a little clunky.
COMPACT CAMERA
Sony DSC-T100
£245
sonystyle.co.uk
Sony’s flagship compact camera is a hugely impressive little unit. It’s incredibly simple to use, with an exceptionally clear, simple menu system. It handles colours extremely well, and indoor shots in good light look stunning, with clear, bright colours which aren’t over-egged like some cameras. As with much of Sony’s kit these days, build quality is hard to fault. This is a solid, well-constructed camera which will definitely survive being thrown around in a briefcase or travel bag. There’s a 5x zoom built-in which should be fine for most pictures, and focusing is really fast and sharp, with decent image stabilisation as well, so hopefully you won’t end up with blurry pictures.
The Carl Zeiss lens is stunning, as is the relatively large 3-inch LCD screen on the back of the camera (there’s no lag or blur at all). The T100 is available in a choice of silver, red or black. It supports Sony memory stick cards, and will also output pictures straight to a TV. This is a nice feature, particularly as it supports high-definition TVs on which the pictures look superb. You can also view pictures on the LCD screen and there’s a slide show-mode which allows you to add music files to the playback. However, it’s not great at getting rid of red-eye from pictures, which can be a problem if you’re trying to take a lot of portrait shots (or pictures in bars and restaurants).
This year’s killer feature – face detection technology – is included, but it doesn’t work quite as well as the Fujifilm version. It is still a very useful element to have though.
Despite these niggles, the quality of the shots from this camera are superb, with detail levels and an ability with natural colour reproduction which eclipse everyone else on the market. It can even take shots in low light without the horrendous digital noise some lesser snappers suffer from. It fully deserves its place at the top of Sony’s digital compact range and is a great travelling companion.
PROS Fast shutter speed and great menu system.
CONS Poor red-eye removal.
RETRO COMPACT ZOOM
Samsung NV11
£170
samsung.co.uk
Samsung only recently entered the camera market, and it’s made a huge impact with its retro-styled digital units. The NV11 with its cold, metal body has a classy, matt-black finish. It’s got curved edges with a large handgrip and looks like a cross between a modern camera and an old-school SLR. There’s a sharp Schneider lens with a 5x optical zoom, which takes it from 7.8-39mm (equivalent to 38-190mm on a 35mm model), while behind there’s a 2.7-inch TFT, which is bright and sharp, and fast enough to keep up with swiftly moving action.
The zoom is optical (ie it has a zoom lens, rather than a digital zoom, which is what most other compact cameras here have). In a nutshell, you’ll get far better quality from the NV11 than from any of the other compacts here if you’re shooting subjects a long way away. However, one of the best features of the NV11 is the video mode, and it’ll shoot film at a pretty decent rate.
The 10.1-megapixel images are very impressive, but this is really a camera that will be sold on its looks – they’re certainly unique, especially up against the slick models from Sony and Fujifilm. The interface Samsung has come up with is excellent, and is uniquely based on a touchscreen. Getting around is simple and there’s very little lag from when the shutter button is pressed to it appearing on-screen. Overall it’s a decent all-rounder and, although a chunky option, if you need a zoom lens it’s a great way of getting around the problem without carrying a big SLR all the time.
PROS Great styling, excellent lens and good video features.
CONS Looks are unique.
ZOOM COMPACT
Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3
£300
panasonic.co.uk
Getting a decent zoom lens into an easy-to-use camera is a tough design challenge, but Panasonic has somehow managed to shoehorn a full 10x zoom into the TZ3, while maintaining a camera body which is small enough to take anywhere. Albeit it is a body that marks it out as something of an ugly duckling (although the black version does look much better), the unit is an impressive achievement.
The Leica-manufactured lens is the equivalent of a 28-280mm lens in a standard 35mm camera, and operates very well – it’s fast and smooth – hopefully meaning you won’t miss that perfect shot while the lens is slowly adjusting itself. Image quality is excellent and the 7.2-megapixel images are unusually sharp for a camera at this price point, although if you’re right at the edge of the zoom’s range you might notice pictures become slightly soft, which is possibly something to do with the image-stabilisation feature in the lens which stops pictures blurring.
Getting around the camera’s menu system is easy, and there’s a wheel on top which allows you to quickly switch between modes. If you’re using the screen, a virtual feature wheel appears there as well so you don’t need to take your eye off the picture. The interface is split into three main menu pages, and they are simple to get around – although we found that we rarely changed settings for the automatic presets anyway.
The automatic options are excellent and covered every shooting situation we came across (there are two different options for taking baby pictures, for example). Battery life is good, and you should get around 250 pictures before charging, although obviously if you’re showing off pictures to friends on the screen as well, this will be less. Overall it’s the smallest zoom compact we have seen, and a good all-rounder if only the design was a little bit slicker it would be perfect.
PROS Great zoom.
CONS Ugly styling.
CAMERA PHONE
Sony Ericsson K850i
From free
sonyericsson.co.uk
Since the first cyber-shot cameras a few years ago, Sony Ericsson has been battling hard with Nokia for the title of “best camera performance” in a phone. The Nokia N95 may be good but now with the K850i the title is firmly with Sony Ericsson.
Initially, it’s a disappointment. This is a big, ugly phone which has a very strange-looking keypad. Instead of the normal joystick-like controller, there are navigation buttons in the keypad itself, although slightly raised. The keys themselves also look a bit odd, and are far too small, but after a few days’ use you’ll be texting at top speed again.
The styling of the phone, with its bright colour scheme and illuminated keypad, does look a little garish, but the back of the phone looks exactly like a digital camera and there are also dedicated camera controls on the side, making operation really easy.
There’s a solid lens cover, and thankfully the K850i also supports microSD cards along with its proprietary Memory Stick Micro format, so that you can use memory cards from a mobile phone. Both are accommodated in one hot-swappable slot which is located on the bottom, under a sizeable spring-hinged gate, which also houses the SIM card and battery to give the phone the feel of a camera.
The cyber-shot is also fitted with accelerometer motion sensors, so the screen automatically flips from portrait to landscape mode when you reposition the phone (a neat trick no doubt inspired by Apple’s iPhone). The menu system is a little clunky, but is a big improvement on previous incarnations.
Picture quality is superb – the best we’ve ever seen on a camera phone – and rivalling the cheaper dedicated digital cameras on the market. The 5-megapixel images are sharp and bright, and it seems to cope well with different light conditions. Although it’s still not on a par with dedicated cameras, the gap between the two is most definitely shrinking. The K850i is the pinnacle of today’s camera phones and a pretty decent mobile to boot.
PROS Great picture quality.
CONS Bulky for a camera phone.
DIGITAL SLR
Olympus E-410
£500 (body only)
olympus.co.uk
Firmly at the prosumer end of the market, this is a camera for serious photographers. The 10-megapixel E410 has a retro look and feel, abandoning a modern grip for a flat-fronted body which resembles 35mm-film SLRs of the 1980s.
The menu system is very quick and fast, with a single dial controlling most of the functions. As you’d expect with this level of camera, virtually every setting can be altered to your heart’s content, and although that can seem a little overwhelming at first, we found you still get pretty decent results with the automatic setting.
As well as working as an SLR camera (ie you need to look through the viewfinder) the E410 also uses a new feature called “Live View”, which uses the LCD screen as a viewfinder in the same way as digital compacts work and this can actually be quite useful for composing images.
Overall, the camera feels very quick and responsive, although using an SLR does take a bit of getting using to after a compact and the viewfinder can be a little dark. Unsurprisingly, the image quality is amazing. You will certainly see a marked difference between pictures from this and those from a digital compact. There
is some noticeable noise on images in low light, but that’s only really noticeable if you’re bringing out large versions of the pictures.
It’s not cheap, but if you’ve outgrown your compact and want to try taking more control over picture settings, the E410 is well worth a look. It’s a bit overwhelming at first, but spend a weekend playing around, and you’ll be taking better pictures than you ever thought possible in no time.
Putting a lens on there will take the price up to around £600, but it is compatible with a lot of other Olympus cameras, so if you’re serious about photography it means the lenses will be a long-term investment.
PROS Superb image quality.
CONS High price.
SLR ZOOM
Panasonic FZ18
£300
panasonic.co.uk
Not quite as full-on as the semi-professional E410, the Panasonic FZ18 is nevertheless an accomplished SLR. Its main selling point is the 18x zoom, although you can’t change the lens. Apart from this minor gripe the FZ18 is an amazingly well-featured camera for £300. Although it does have an 8-megapixel camera and image quality is more than adequate, it’s more comparable to the Sony and Fujifilm compacts than the prosumer models. That said, for all but the most demanding pictures, that’s fine.
The menu system is easy enough to get around, but some of the options can be a little confusing at first. Control is via a mini-joystick, and a dial on top of the camera controls the shooting modes. Zooming is easily controllable, and there’s a fast and slow zoom mode depending on what you’re trying to take pictures of. There’s a small pop-up flash on top of the unit, which works well, and a flash control close to the shutter so you can easily control it.
Overall, the Panasonic has a well-built feel, and in use is quick to get to grips with. It’s a great big brother to a small compact you can carry around all the time, and for people keen to take better pictures but who perhaps don’t want to get into playing around with too many settings and swapping lenses about, it’s a great buy.
PROS Huge zoom lens.
CONS Image quality only adequate.
PRO CAMERA
Nikon D80
£699
nikon.co.uk
Aimed wholly at the semi-professional and enthusiast end of the market, Nikon’s D80 is a real powerhouse of a camera. However, this is not a camera you can just pick up and play with, you do need to know what you’re doing. We found it a little overwhelming at times, but for those who are keen, the number of parameters you can change makes it a great tool to learn about photography with.
Most shooting can be controlled through three dials on the camera body. The mode dial lets you choose between program, aperture or shutter-priority, full-manual, full-auto, or any of the six preset exposure scene modes. The other two dials, located on the front and back of the grip, let you change aperture and shutter speed. Together, they make full manual shooting quick and easy. It’s an incredibly fast picture, and switch it on and you can be up and running in far less than a second, and there is no discernible shutter lag once you actually take a picture.
The screen also lets you alter the settings and the menu system is fast and responsive. Although it looks frightening initially, it is actually pretty well laid-out. There’s even a simpler menu to select if you’re new to the camera. The in-built flash is impressive, and certainly better than anything else you’ll find, although obviously the camera will work well with other flash units too. Images from the D80 are simply breathtaking when compared with anything looked at here. This is a true professional-quality camera, and the clarity and colour are in a different class. If you’re serious about photography it’s a superb choice.
PROS Stunning quality and professional features.
CONS Too complex for the average user.
Mark Prigg is the Science and Technology Correspondent of the London Evening Standard
