Timothy Armes' blog

I love my 5D MkII with it fabulous full frame sensor and great range of lenses.  For my sport lifestyle shoots I wouldn’t be with anything else, I absolutely need the flexibility, handling and exceptional image quality that come with professional DSLRs. In these situations I really appreciate the large camera body with easy to access buttons and dials – I need good ergonomics and I don’t want to have to fiddle.

However, I’ll fully admit that my DSLR isn’t always appropriate; I find that I hardly ever get my ‘big’ camera out for casual just-for-the-fun-of-it shooting.  I miss that. I’ve just come back from a week’s break to Florence and the size and weight of the 5D MkII with two 2.8 lenses was just too much – it was a bane around my neck, literally….

But I could use a small compact for the fun stuff, right?  Well, no.  The problem is that I get absolutely no pleasure from shooting with today’s compact cameras for several reasons:

• Their minuscule sensors give near infinite depth-of-field, and if I can’t play with selective focus then much of the pleasure of taking photos is gone.
• Their ergonomics and slow reaction times are frustrating.
• The resulting images are poor – for years the camera manufacturers have been playing the marketing game with the megapixel count, and as they’ve struggled to cram far too many pixels¹ onto those tiny sensors the results have been tragically poor quality images and appalling low light performance.

I thought that my hopes had been answered in 2006 when Sigma revealed the DP1 – the  first compact with a big sensor, but the camera wasn’t really up to the job.  Two years later, with the DP2, they hadn’t learnt much from their mistakes².

So, I’ve been waiting a long time for a compact digital camera with a wide aperture and corresponding large sensor (for reducing the depth of field) that offers high image quality, good low light performance and decent reactivity.

I’d nearly lost all hope, but now it seems that that day is finally dawning.  By the end of the year they’ll be quite a few “serious” compacts that make a concerted effort to meet these needs.  Here’s a quick run down.

(more…)

1. Do consumers need typically need upwards of 12MPixels to print family snapshots?  I made beautiful A3 prints with my 6MPixel 300D.  It’s utter madness [↩]
2. I have to wonder what they were thinking.  They clearly saw that there was a market for a big sensor compact, but it didn’t occur to them that the market consisted of serious photographers who would want a fast camera.  Sluggish performance is one of the major issues I have with consumer compacts. [↩]