Honest Cameras for Other People

[errantember]

I recently had my Nikon 4500 ripped off at a Goddess Night event, and suddenly found myself in the market for a new digicam. My original plan was to poll my friends for likely candidates, then borrow each one for a few days to see how it performed. Experience tells me that simply looking at online reviews and a few minutes in the store aren't enough to really tell me if a camera works for me. My first prospect was a Panasonic DMC-F27. I spent two days of intense shooting with this model, taking over 500 pictures both during day and night, and below are my overall impressions. Several of the better pictures I took are posted here.

Things I like:

Lots of power in such a small camera. It's not quite pocketable, but it's close.
Very clean pictures with very low camera shake even at 12x zoom in daylight
As much automatic or manual control as you could ask for
Battery life very good (3-5 hours shooting)
LCD Viewfinder for saving power and being able to frame in bright daylight situations
Good in-hand feel

Things I didn't like:

Fairly awful low-light operation. High noise, only a maximum of 400 ISO, almost impossible to take decent pictures in the after-dark urban environment where a large percentage of my photography takes place.

LCD hard-mounted 180 degrees from lens - I do a lot of candid photography in public, and I come from a background of the Nikon Coolpix split-bodies cameras, which are second-to none for the ability to take pictures without disturbing a scene. The fact that I basically have to point the camera directly at the subject makes this very difficult with this camera, so unless I'm planning on completely changing my style of photography, this doesn't work for me.

LCD a bit grainy looking, making review of pictures on-camera, even at high zoom, misleading.

Macro is quite good (see the Spider picture below), but not nearly as good as the Coolpix split-body cameras I'm used to. I could get a decent focus lock at about 5 cm with this camera, with my 4500 or 995 I was able to get within less than 1 cm.

Generally this is a great camera, and I can see why Adam likes it. My requirements for better low-light and candid photography performance are fairly unusual, and in almost every other sense this is a winner for the money.

This camera provided an excellent base-line by way of www.dpreview.com. By checking out their meticulous low-light performance statistics, I was able to tell how much better or worse a given camera was than this one. This allowed me, after a few days of shopping around, to buy one of these. The Sony DSC-F717 not only has a F/2.0 lens, but it goes to 800 ISO *AND* has the Sony Night Shot feature. It also has a split-bodied design that's not quite as flexible as the Nikon split-bodies, but will probably be good enough for my needs. I stepped down from a 6 MP to a 5 MP and from an image-stabilized 12x zoom to a 5x zoom, but the low-light performance and a few other nice features make this worth it to me.

Comments

Re: Canon, Nikon

[errantember.livejournal.com]

You might want to consider the new Nikon S4, which has the split-body design and a 10x optical zoom. I rejected it because it doesn't have manual control like the older split-bodied Nikons, but the split-body design is second-to-none for in-place candid photography. Not only is it very non-obvious where the lens is pointing, but the zoom mechanism is entirely internal. With a minimum of misleading body language, it's possible to photograph someone from literally arms length without disturbing the scene. If you're willing to deal with lower resolution, looking for a used 995 or 4500 in good condition is also a possibility. The 4500 is small enough for a big pocket, has full manual control, full external lens and flash compability and the split-body, and can be had online for less than $300.