Recently camera manufacturers have released their models for the year 2010. Many of them share similar shapes and characteristics in camera design rather than trying to differ from one another. All lead to one goal: versatility.
1st trend: Wider and wider going from 35mm to 24mm
Not like you’ll really look but, if you look closely at the 35mm equivalent wide focal length of each camera lens you’ll see that most of them start from 24mm to 28mm. I believe many manufacturers finally understood how many compact users like to self-shoot with or without friends. When I had the 25mm lens on my FX35, I was able to put many heads into the frame.
2nd trend: Goodbye 3X zoom lens
2010 marks the end of the classical 3x zoom lens. Back in the days, giving the focal range of the lens of a compact camera was to talk gibberish to the consumer. Instead, the multiplication factor was born to tell the consumer that he can zoom in X times his “normal” field of view (which at the time was 35mm). Ever since the first 28mm zoom lens got out, the equation slightly changed to X times the “wide” field the view. One shouldn’t be surprised to see a 24mm wide-angle zoom lens have more Xs to reach a narrower zoom lens’s max zoom.
For example: to get to 200mm, a 24mm zoom lens needs to have an 8.3x zoom where as a 35mm zoom lens only needs 5.7x. Thus, the number of Xs can be used as a false marketing tool (but we’ll get to that in another blog article)
My point here is to show that 4x has become the standard instead of 3x and many have gone past the 7x zoom ratio.
3rd trend: Goodbye handgrip, Hello pocket.
The handgrip was once popular among compact camera mainly because it encouraged a better tactile photography experience to the user’s hands: better grip, better stabilization. The trade-off was that the camera wouldn’t be pocketable. As the image stabilizer got better, the need for a better camera grip was discarded for the sake of portability. For 2010, most of the compact cameras can be slid in medium pockets.
We can now understand how versatile the compacts of 2010 will be in terms of the lens. Usually, a zoom lens’s sharpness or brightness degrades in correlation of its amplitude: low aperture (f3.3 instead of f2.8), lens defects like chromatic aberrations, distortion and corner softness arise from such design choices. As such, some brands even stopped associating their lenses to famous lens makers like Leica or Carl Zeiss. Sony mostly jumped to G lenses, Panasonic uses Lumix DC Vario lenses. I presume it’s because they couldn’t afford to keep producing lenses up to lens makers’ standards and have to process the lens defects with the onboard image processor. It seems only Schneider-Kreuznach remain in some Samsung and Kodak cameras.
Lets continue with other trends.
Continuing bad trends: The quest for megapixels on compact
It seems the release of the Fuji EXR cameras, the LX3 and the two Canon flagship compacts didn’t make the consumers or manufacturers understand how insignificant megapixel boosts over 10 are. Some of the 2010 compacts have a megapixel count of over 14!! I have to disagree with the choices. Unless some genius engineer programs a fast noise removing algorithm into the image processing chip of a camera, I don’t believe image quality in something this huge can be achieved beyond ISO200. Pointless if you ask me.
Continuing good trend: The spread of low light performing sensors
After the success of his EXMOR R sensor (fast fps, sweep panorama, good lowlight), Sony added two new entries in the X-type compact series: the super-zoom HX5 and slim-compact TX7. They now have the EXMOR R sensor in the H, W and T series that compose of Sony’s compact line. Just before 2009 ended, Fuji’s got his EXR sensor into the S200EXR and F70EXR to give out a compact and a bridge solution to the consumer. We can see that both brands have produced great performing low light machines and are making the best of them.
I’ll have to say that 2010 will be a very interesting year for those looking for compact cameras because most of them fill the convenience of having one: responsive and portable with a versatile stabilized high zoom lens.
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