We’ll admit we save our Nikon excitement for the sort of gear that comes with “bad mother” stitched into its casing, but sometimes even our jaded souls can get intrigued by a compact. This particular slimline unit has an OLED touchscreen display, with the additional inclusion of multitouch and gesture support, which already gets it right up to speed on the latest trends. With a 5x optical zoom, 12 megapixel sensor, and 720p/30fps video, it’s also no slouch on the spec sheet, but reviewers at Photography Blog found a few shortcomings. The Nikon S70 is said to be overly reliant on the 3.5-inch touch display for controls, and although the camera is both thin and ultrafast to start up, those benefits come at the greatest cost of all: image quality is only average, and noise handling is poor even at base ISO. We’ll file this one in our “vivacious but vapid” archive while you busy yourself with reading the full review.
Generally speaking, having something “ruggedized” ruins the aesthetic appeal. You trade style for function, and that’s been perfectly acceptable until today. The EX-G1, which becomes the first camera in the new EXILIM G line, takes a few cues from Casio‘s G-SHOCK line while being the planet’s thinnest shock-resistant camera. Furthermore, this thing is freezeproof, waterproof and dustproof, and at just 0.78-inches thick, you’ll hardly notice it shoved in your left rear pocket. As for specs, you’re looking at a 12.1 megapixel sensor, intelligent AF, a dedicated movie mode (848 x 480), 35.7MB of inbuilt memory (yeah, we know), a microSD / microSDHC expansion slot, 3x optical zoom and a 2.5-inch rear LCD with a 960 x 240 resolution. We’re told that the rechargeable battery should last for around 300 shots on a full charge, and the Interval Shooting function enables the camera to automatically fire at fixed points when shooting action sports. If you’re foaming at the mouth right now, your cure can be found this December in black or red for $299.99. The full release and a promo video is just past the break.
By now you should be thoroughly familiar with Sony’s Party-shot-loving and almost unreasonably svelte TX1 compact shooter. Its headline features — 720p movie mode and better low light performance courtesy of the Exmor R sensor — have now been put to the test and we’re here with the scorecard ready to spill the results. Reassuringly, all reviewers found image quality to be excellent for the camera’s size class, and the TX1 even outperformed its peers by keeping noise comfortably in check all the way up to ISO 800. A 1cm (or 0.4-inches for you heretics) Macro mode was another highlight, though criticisms did rain down on issues of lens distortion, a fiddly touchscreen menu that was too prone to accidental activation, and an uncompetitive price point. Of course, your biggest draw here might still be the optional (and spendy) party dock, but the thorough reviews below at least give you the chance to pretend like you’re buying this camera for the image quality alone.
Read – Photography Blog review Read – Wired review Read – Imaging Resource review Read – Electric Pig review
My first real camera was a Canon S50. I loved it. Canon let the pro compact S line die a few years later. It’s back with the S90, though the only thing that’s the same is that it’s still awesome.
Sex and Brains
It’s got the same spacious image sensor as the G11—1/1.7″ as opposed to 1/2.5″ like most point-and-shoots. But instead of being built into a Panzer tank, it’s in the body of a hot German model. It’s an actual point-and-shoot: It fits in the pocket of your skinny jeans, but delivers, for the most part, the same wow image quality.
I wish it was slightly more square with sharper angles for an even more classic aesthetic, but it’s still pretty classy looking. The texture, which makes for half of the appeal, makes it a little slippery. The control ring around the lens is like the perfect scarf that ties it altogether. And despite being a bantam-weight shooter, it feels more solid than most cameras its size.
Lord of the Ring
What makes the camera really work is that control ring wrapped around the lens. By default, when you turn it, it adjusts the main setting for each mode—aperture in aperture priority, shutter speed in shutter priority, you get the idea. Using the ring function button on top of the camera, you can set the ring to adjust almost whatever parameter you want though, like white balance, ISO, exposure, even specific zoom intervals.
Truthfully, using the dial never feels completely seamless, because of way you’re forced to hold the camera. As a result of its pint size, there’s no completely natural hand or finger posture for spinning the ring. But, the control it manages to put at your fingertips is remarkable: In manual mode, I had aperture mapped to the main ring, exposure set to the control ring on the back (which, like the G11, is a little too small to have a settings dpad stuffed in the center of it) and ISO speed mapped to the shortcut button. The only real issue with that setup is that the ISO setting interface lags behind your input occasionally, so you sometimes overshoot the ISO speed you wanted.
Just a Little More Hardware Talk
There’s no viewfinder, so you’re stuck using the screen exclusively. The LCD is a little bigger than the G11’s, at 3 inches, though it uses the same number of pixels and obviously doesn’t swivel out. It too is easily viewable in sunlight, though I found a more of a difference, exposure-wise, between what I thought I shot according to the display and what I later saw on my computer, than I noticed with the G11. Also, there’s no flash hot shoe, like you get with the G11.
The battery’s small, obviously, so your picture taking is capped at a little over 200 shots, according to Canon. My days of shooting didn’t contradict that, for better or for worse—I’d get to half battery after around 100 shots and a couple video clips.
Finally, the Photos (and Video)
Since it’s the same 10-megapixel image sensor as the G11, yes, you do get just about the same fantastic image quality, solid low-light performance (noise doesn’t start really kicking in til ISO 800, and even that’s totally usable for most stuff) and ability to shoot in RAW. The main difference is in the lens. The S90 has a faster lens that’ll shoot at F/2 wide open, meaning you rely less on that high ISO—up to 3200—to compensate for the lack of light. The oh-so-small price for this incredibly fast lens is that you lose a bit of zoom, since it goes out to 105mm, vs. the G11’s 140mm, but who cares? I can’t reiterate how big of a deal a lens like this is on this kind of point-and-shoot. That said, I seemed to get photos that were a touch less sharp than what I got on the G11.
Here’s a gallery of some stuff I shot, which you can compare to G11 sample photos and ISO tests (spoiler, they look great):
The video’s still 640×480, and still quite good too:
Buy If You Need a Tiny-But-Great Camera
I know, it’s $430, way more than most point-and-shoots cost in this day and age. But the amount of picture power this literally slips into your pocket is almost unbelievable: Outstanding low-light performance for a camera this size; a speedy lens; full control rings, plural; and yep, RAW. It’s the soul of what makes the $500 behemoth G11 great, packaged in a true point-and-shoot. You lose some power and some pro tools, like the swivel screen, a (shitty) viewfinder, faster burst shooting, hot shoe, some zoom and a custom mode or two, but you’re also shedding a ton of bulk, meaning you’ll actually take it everywhere. And the best camera’s always the one you have with you—for me, that’s this camera, which just happens to be an excellent one all by itself.
G11’s awesome image sensor plus a fastfastfast lens means awesome photos
It’s fat. It’s $500. It takes fantastic photographs.
The G11 is Canon’s top-of-the-line point-and-shoot. It occupies a sorta strange spot, towering over the average point-and-shoot in basically every metric—image quality, size, weight and price—but sits just below entry-level DSLRs and more recently, micro four thirds cameras.
So, there are two ways to look at the G11: It’s an amazing street camera. More discreet than a DSLR, but more powerful than a run-of-the-mill point-and-shoot. You can’t stuff it in your jeans pocket, but that’s fine, because you want to sling it over your shoulder anyways. The other way is that you can buy a more versatile entry-level DSLR that’s not much larger for around the same price, especially if you step back a generation or so.
It’s all about your priorities.
H-h-h-h-hardware
Everything about this camera is just—solid. The full-metal jacket makes it feel indestructible, while the shape evokes the classic cameras you feel like you’re supposed to be taking photos with. It’s thick, remarkably so, in part because of the flip-out swivel LCD screen. And it’s definitely more along the lines of a rangefinder-style camera than a typical point-and-shoot.
The real magic of this camera lies in the dedicated control dials. You’ll fine three on top—exposure compensation, ISO speed, and shooting mode. They feel cramped and tiny, at first, but the snap they make as as you rotate them is surprisingly deep and satisfying. Having these settings at your fingers at all times is so much of why the G11 feels like a camera that’s a step above point-and-shoots, a tool for creating photographs.
The back dial is the most frustrating part of controlling the camera—a ring surrounds a four-way d-pad with a button in the center. Ultimately, you wind up pressing buttons on the d-pad when you’re trying to rotate the dial to adjust shutter speed or aperture, or simply pressing the wrong button because it’s so small. The menu system, otherwise, is a pretty standard Canon setup, which looks a lot like the G10’s—it’s not dead simple, but it’s not overly complicated either, and a couple minutes of fiddling will reveal all of its secrets.
The viewfinder is utterly depressing. I want to use it, badly. It just feels intrinsically wrong to hold a camera of this caliber out in front of me to shoot, not up to my eyeball. Meanwhile, the G11’s viewfinder is so small, and the coverage is so bad (you can see the lens through it!), that it’s nigh useless, like trying to compose through a pinhole.
One of the shooting modes, quickshot, sounds like a good idea on paper, but is ruined by this viewfinder. The camera constantly adjusts parameters while waiting for you to take the photo, so you can fire off instantly without worrying about missing the shot. Unfortunately, you have to use the minuscule viewfinder in quickshot, and I wound up botching far more photos than I did nailing them.
So, you’re pretty trapped to using the decent flip-out swivel LCD display. Honestly, I probably would’ve preferred the static-but-larger 3-inch version on the G10, to the 2.8-inch, 461,000-dot display on the G11.
The LCD is really bright, though, and perfectly usable in direct sunlight, with a wide viewing angle to boot. But the video feed is not quite crisp enough on it to use it for manual focusing—in this mode, a zoomed in box appears in the center of the display as you spin the back dial to bring it into focus. The experience of focusing becomes a bad iPhone game.
Can we talk about the photos please?
With the G11, Canon pulled the bold maneuver of cutting megapixels—to 10, from 14 on the G10—in order to get better quality and low-light performance. It was the right move. Low-light images are definitely improved, and more detail is preserved up through ISO 800. Shots at ISO 1600 are definitely usable at web resolutions, which is pretty impressive for a compact camera. You should stay away from the special “low light” shooting mode, though, which cuts the size of pictures in half to try to extract every ounce of light possible—it produced uniformly bad pictures.
The G11 has a wide-angle zoom lens with the same basic specs as the G10, starting at 28mm and going up to 140mm, which is versatile enough to shoot just about anything you’d want. I’m not sure, however, if it corrects some of the problems at the wide-end with the macro mode, though, since I didn’t have a G10 to compare it with.
The runthrough of the ISO range goes a couple ways—on programmed auto, letting the camera figure out what to make of the ISO setting I picked, and then another set where I dictated shutter speed, so you can see how much you gain (or lose, depending on your point of view) as you ratchet up the ISO setting.
Like past G series cameras, you can shoot in RAW, but if you do, you’re stuck with using Canon’s software to process it for the time being. In the full sample gallery above, I’ve marked the handful shot in RAW.
In a world where phones and gadgets the size of a jumbo pack of Juicy Fruit shoot 720p, the fact that video’s limited to 640×480 resolution on such a stacked camera gets a big frowny face. But, the video the G11 produces at that resolution is generally excellent (just compare to the video-shootin’ iPod nano). That’s because it’s packed with data—the bitrate averages around 10Mbps, which is more than the Flip Mino HD, at 9Mbps for 720p video. That’s why it looks so vibrant compared to a lot of the 720p video out there. Sure, 720p out of this would be nice, but I’d take VGA video that looks great over HD video that looks like crap.
Okay, but do I buy it?
I like this camera a lot. It’s what I’d reach for whenever I wouldn’t feel like tugging along a honkin’ DSLR, and I’d feel like I wasn’t sacrificing too much. The real question, I think, it how it stacks up against Panasonic’s Lumix LX3, which is in the same demographic—a lauded $500 point-and-shoot—and outgunned the G10 in many respects (though the G10 tried to cram 14 megapixels onto the same-sized sensor the G11 only squeezes 10 megapixels onto). The slightly cheaper S90 offers the same sensor as the G11 as well, and inside of a pocketable body—though you lose perks like the dedicated control dials and a viewfinder, as far as that’s a perk on the G11.
If you do buy the G11, you won’t regret it—you’ll be too busy taking pictures.
Photographs are top-notch for a compact camera
Solid low-light performance
Built to smash into people’s spaces and live to smash again
It’s probably best to think of Samsung’s Pixon 12 not as a phone with a killer camera, but more so as a good point-and-shoot with phone capabilities tacked on. Our friends at Engadget Chinese managed to get some hands-on with the device, and while they say the voice and SMS portion is nothing to write home about, the form factor and AMOLED screen seems quite nice and the sample pictures come out even nicer. Hit up the read link for some odd, machine-translated text and pretty photography.
Canon held off about as long as it could, but it finally caved to the pressures of adding a pressure-sensitive screen to one of its Digital ELPHs. The SD980 IS goes down as the first-ever touchscreen PowerShot, offering a better-than-average set of specifications, a few color options, an attractive size and a 720p movie mode that helps to set it apart from some of its VGA-quality contemporaries. We took the cam for a quick spin just to see how Canon’s adaptation of the touchscreen felt in real-world use, and we’ve posted up our impressions — along with a few sample galleries and a raw 720p video clip — just beyond the break.
ifixit’s gotten ahold of Nikon’s new camera – projector hybrid, the Coolpix S1000pj, and done what they do… meaning they’ve ripped it apart. Okay, they slowly and carefully disassembled it while painstakingly photographing the proceedings. Most interesting to us, of course, is the Nikon developed, L-shaped projector we just heard about that makes the whole set up possible, and we have to say that the internal layout of the S1000pj is terribly impressive to behold. There’s another shot (and video!) after the break — but hit the read link for the entire, time consuming project in all its tedious glory!
The Exilim EX-H10 superzoom looks just dandy in its minimalist black exterior, but Casio has decided to furnish its Japanese customers with a couple more options. To be fair, our far-Eastern brethren have had to choose between a less classy silver affair and a zany pink number, so they’ll probably welcome the newfound diversity. The specs remain the same, of course, with a highly competent 12.1 megapixel sensor, 10x optical zoom and 720p video recording being the highlights, so we wouldn’t expect the as yet unannounced prices to differ either. The blue version above will be joined by a gold variant (picture after the break) when the two are released on October 9.
We’ve always heard that life was full of compromises, and evidently Pentax made a few when it decided to build its toughest, most rugged point-and-shoot camera of all time. On paper, the Optio W80 looked mighty promising, but in practice, the all-important image quality was found to fall short. Over at PhotographyBLOG, critics found that the camera could withstand “virtually anything” within reason, and while the 5x optical zoom and HD movie mode were both appreciated, most everything else was at least somewhat disappointing. The anti-shake system was found to simply slow the camera down, and the image quality was hamstrung by excessive noise at all ISO levels — even 100. Feel free to peek the full review down in the read link, but make sure to keep your expectations in check.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
G11’s awesome image sensor plus a fastfastfast lens means awesome photos
Control ring can feel awkward
More battery life and 720p video would be nice
Photographs are top-notch for a compact camera
It’s huge
The viewfinder is basically useless
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