As you probably know, I had to buy a new travel camera in Quito. The camera manufacturers are pushing a few camera features pretty heavily, most of which I think are a bunch of crap.
I will post the list of the top 3 travel camera features next week.
Here are the top 3 myths of buying a travel camera:
- Megapixels are the best measure of image quality. This has been around for several years, and the myth is just as bad for all types of cameras (not just travel cameras). The truth is that anything over 4 megapixels is great, and I have printed amazing 11x 14 images from an 8-megapixel camera. If you need to (and do) regularly print wall posters (20 x 30 inches or larger), maybe you need 16 megapixels. If you don’t print a poster every week, anything over 10 megapixels is wasted (and actually hurts your images, as I’ll explain next week).
- A big zoom is necessary for a travel camera. Juat like the “megapixel myth”, this one is rooted in lazy marketing: marketing teams think that following the Texan maxim of “Bigger is better” will convince prospects to buy. While it may do that occasionally, it won’t produce high-quality photos – once you get past 130mm of effective lens length (which is the outer limit of most 4x and some 3x zoom lenses), camera shake hurts image quality (while some anti-shake mechanisms are out there, most of the ones available in point-and-shoot cameras aren’t very good). So, buying a camera with an 8x or greater zoom means that you probably just paid for a feature that you won’t be able to use very often.
- Face-detection (and Smile-detection) are really helpful features. This means that you can’t recognize faces or smiles, and know when the camera is focused on them. WHAT? If you can’t recognize a face, a smile, or when the camera is focused, you should just go home. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. This is technology, remember, so it’s probably going to miss sometimes. Which means that paintings of people, wall clocks, and yes, streetlights will all be identified as faces without smiles (I’ve seen this happen).
So those are the top three myths that everyone was pushing while I was camera shopping. Here are the others that I heard:
- A video camera takes just as good stills as a point and shoot.
- A camera that looks like an SLR is better because, well, it is shaped like an SLR.
- A camera can automatically tell what kind of picture you want to take and adjust it settings automatically (sometimes called “Best Shot”).
@Brian, And a high-res photo on a small sensor is super-noisy, so if you print it out bigger than 4×6, it LOOKS like it´s digital (which is usually bad, IMHO)….
So true on myth #1. A high resolution capture of a blurry image is still blurry. I always shy away from point and shoots with optical zoom and look for the largest lense opening possible. Best I ever owned was a Samsung Digimax S800… but I killed it while in Jerusalem because the lense opened in my pocket. Snapped the extender mechanism.
Which brings on another note – don’t keep a point and shoot with an extending lense in your pocket