Gearhead 3

T-9 Days

When I went on photography workshops in the last two years I brought a small but powerful point and shoot camera, a Canon S90, with me. It was (and the current model, the S100, is) a great little camera. I've taken any number of great photographs with it. You have full control of all the important settings, although not as conveniently as with the big Nikon, but it has a couple of fatal flaws as a backup for landscapes:

Canon S90 (inop) and Olympus XZ-1, May 2012

• The sensor is tiny, although it has plenty of megapixels. This means that it's relatively insensitive to light (compared to the DLSR), and also it has a more limited dynamic range (from dark to light in a single image)
• It has no way of attaching filters, which are important for landscape photography. Filters give you more control over light, and that's what photography's all about
• Manual focusing is technically possible but practically useless, which means the camera usually will choose what your shot is focused on, not you

Less serious, but important limitations:

• There is no viewfinder, which makes seeing the image in the bright sun difficult
• The range of shutter speeds and apertures is constrained, and remote release (to minimize vibration) is limited to the self timer
• The lack of external buttons means you're in the menus all the time to manage settings, which really slows you down

And the most important limitation: it got dropped and broken in January (not by me!). I replaced with with an Olympus XZ-1, which is also great, but really doesn't solve all of the important problems, let alone the less I portably ones.



The difference between DLSRs (big and highly functional) and point and shoot (small but limited) has frustrated many photographers for a while now. Fortunately, the camera industry has introduced a new class of cameras over the last couple of years which bridge the gap. More on this later.