No Point in Point & Shoot!

Posted on: Mon May 27, 2013

I was interested to read this article on PetaPixel about Olympus pulling out of the Compact Camera market. The article basically says that a compact camera is not much better quality than a smart phone and go on to say that most people don’t care about any small quality difference anyway.

I find this interesting because I think there is quite a big quality difference between a compact camera and smart phone. The size of the image sensor (physical size not mega pixels) is important to the quality of the image and most compacts are going to have larger sensors than mobile phones, not forgetting the size of the lenses on these devices too, which will make a big difference.

It’s kind of ironic that in the 1960′s Kodak brought us the Kodak Instamatic camera, the camera that brought photography to the masses. Now Apple (and others) have done this with a device that most of us have anyway. Except now the quality isn’t as good as it was in the 1960s.

Of course a smart phone has lots of benefits that a compact camera doesn’t, the ability to add filters and upload to your favourite social media site being fairly important factors. So now we are seeing compact camera companies producing camera’s that have built in Wifi or even 3G so you can upload direct from the camera and some even have the option to use Apps to add filters. For me I think this is really what they have to do to compete against the mobile phones.

Also another really big development in the compact camera market is that Ricoh have just produced a compact camera with a large APS-C sized image sensor. The same sized image senor that is my main camera, the Fuji X-Pro1. So if they have managed to get a big image sensor in a camera this size perhaps it’s only a matter of time before others do.

It’s true though that SLRs offer control and quality that is very difficult to rival and anyone who really cares about image quality would probably not be considering a compact as their main camera. But for those that want better snapshots or an additional go-anywhere camera then I say don’t forget the compact camera just yet.