Comments on: Compact cameras have arrived at That Stage

By: 33hurrli

33hurrli — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 07:05:28 +0000

Dear Stephen Fry

It’s a great pleasure to read your blog and listen to your blessays, I’m very much looking foreward to the next one…as far as cameras…I just bought a Canon G9 Powershot because the buttons and handling remind me to my old Canon F1, a heavy tractor of a camera, but most beloved. So I’m the more retrotype of custumer and definetly not to bait with always new schnickschnack, although I very much appreciate the audiorecordfunction of my new camera, which makes it a welcome instrument to controle my singing exercises…

By: rademisto

rademisto — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 07:24:38 +0000

If you can wait until 2009, Kodak promise to add GPS integration to their camera range. According to ‘Pocket-lint’ “According to Kodak, the GPS information will be added to the metadata of the photo…” more of Pocket-lint report here
http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/10684/11708/kodak-add-gps-to-cameras.phtml

Until then, unless other camera manufacturers beat Kodak to the 2009 finishing line, there is the Sony GPS tracker, the GPS CS1 a little device that records the position and syncs with your digital photo information……more information here
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0608/06080202sonygpscs1.asp
and here
http://www.sat.dundee.ac.uk/arb/gpscs1/

and I agree, I am very surprised that it has taken so long before some person switched that particular light on.

By: The Bellman

The Bellman — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 06:07:58 +0000

I would suggest that there is one, maybe two, more pieces of technology that can be added to compact cameras before the options for innovation are exhausted. The first of these is one that I am very surprised is not common already: integrated GPS so that photos are automatically “geotagged” with the location of the shot. There are various means of tagging photos on your computer after you have extracted them from your camera, and before sending them on to whatever Web 2.1 cache you choose, but they all appear to have been created by the grand-nephews of Heath Robinson.

The second is some sort of automatic image analysis that will prevent the user from taking yet another photo of their children putting a bowl of spaghetti on their head, or lining their relatives up against the wall as if waiting for a much-desired firing squad.

By: Susan P.

Susan P. — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:19:20 +0000

PC Bitseach – although an adjunct topic, I have a wireless mouse and keyboard and particular re the mouse I was going through AA batteries at an incredible rate. I bought a rechargeable set and they never work in the mouse and totally unreliably in the keyboard. I’ve just gone back to forking out tracts of money on ‘ordinary’ batteries.

By: Pages tagged "ridiculous"

Pages tagged "ridiculous" — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:55:47 +0000

[...] bookmarks tagged ridiculous Compact cameras have arrived at That Stage saved by 3 others Phillychesse bookmarked on 02/13/08 | [...]

By: photobymarkdavey

photobymarkdavey — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:50:39 +0000

I have some beautiful film cameras – Rolleiflex, Nikon F100, Olympus MJU II, Zeiss Ikon, but none is really quite as nice as the Nikon D2X. Mainly because everytime you push the button with any film model it costs you dear.
Between 1996-2001 working at a weekly paper I reckon I took 150,000 frames of film – I should have switched to digital sooner!

By: PC Bitseach

PC Bitseach — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:10:18 +0000

…hmm, last message cut off in mid-stream – don’t think it liked the “less than” symbol!

… my basic phone (less than Â£100) has 3.2 MPixels, flash, steadying doodah, decent memory and space for a stick, excellent battery life and from which I can make and receive ‘phone calls! Who could ask for anything more.

Consequently Nikon will never get another brass farthing from me!
Pc Bits’

By: PC Bitseach

PC Bitseach — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:07:14 +0000

I bought a digital camera a few years ago and couldn’t use it due to the utter rubbishness of the battery life (despite researching these things before buying in “Which” – thanks a lot, Which!)

I’ve recently bought a fairly basic mobile phone (:o(

Pc Bits’

By: Redbeard

Redbeard — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 20:41:14 +0000

I like my Olympus (SP560) Ultra Zoom bridge camera – ordinary AA batteries (so emergency spares are universally available), good macro capability, and now with 18x zoom – an SLR style compact that fits into a (large) pocket.

Fewer megapixels were better the first 8MP sensors were too noisy but the current crop have redeemed the situation.

I like my zoom – the extreme ends may not be perfect but the effective range gives me a useful flexibility that I would miss with a true SLR or lesser compact.

By: type

type — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:18:32 +0000

Sulka is right. Compacts are still pimping the wrong-headed megapixel race to people who have better things to do than read about camera electronics.

To get better picture quality from compacts, what is needed are:

- LESS megapixels, probably no more than 6 (better 6MP of quality detail than 14MP of crappy detail)

- a much BIGGER sensor to allow those pixels to expose themselves properly to the all-important light and reduce noise and other abberations resulting from pixel overcrowding

-good quality, fast lenses, with limited zooms or even fixed focal lengths

All these things are anathema to almost all the camera manufacturers, mostly because they are expensive at a time when mobile convergence is eating their margins and are hard sells to the uneducated. There again, mexapixels and face detection are hardly winning pitches, either.

The only camera possessing these 3 things is one whose debut on the market is still in doubt, a Sigma. It will be expensive. It should take photos with image quality similar to DSLRs. If it does, it will be primarily because it has (in miniature) the few essential ingredients above that result in DSLRs getting better image quality than compacts.