FOGEY 5 Digital Compact Cameras (older)
Canon PowerShot S90
Unfeasibly capable compact for photo nerds with fat wallets
On the face of it a point-and-shoot but the cognoscenti will have you down as one of their own if you tote this or the Panasonic Lumix LX3 at your next wedding/christening/wake. Resolution is 10 megapixels and although other compacts boast more what are you going to do with them – print billboard posters? The S90 can save pic files in RAW mode, which will mean something to the committed and precious little to everyone else (who don’t need to know). Good wide angle 28mm lens with 3.8x optical zoom. Highly desirable. There’s now a newer version, the S95, which might be even better (and cheaper).
Around £350. More info here. Buy here.
Samsung WB100
Nifty response to Japanese high-end compacts from land of poached pooch and noisy neighbours
The WB100 has a 3-inch AMOLED screen. Imagine! It’s a biggie. TF has gone to Wikipedia so you don’t have to: “An active-matrix OLED (AMOLED) display consists of OLED pixels that have been deposited or integrated onto a thin film transistor (TFT) array to form a matrix of pixels that generate light upon electrical activation, which functions as a series of switches to control the current flowing to each of the pixels. Got that? Oh, and OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode. Ho hum. Huge 12 megapixel resolution, 24mm wide angle lens, 5x optical zoom, HD video recording. It’s a beast, only smaller. And good luck finding it on the Samsung UK website, because you won’t. It was launched Q1 2009 and is now lost in the mists of time. The current variant is the WB600 so links below relate to that model.
Around £150 More info here. Buy here.
Panasonic Lumix ZX1
Smorgasbord of features force-fed into size zero snapper
Panasonic don’t make many duff cameras and the ZX1 doesn’t buck the trend. Its 25mm wide angle Leica lens (buy a Leica branded compact and you buy a Lumix in drag) gives the same zoom range as a 25-200mm zoom lens on a 35mm camera and waaaay more if you reduce the resolution below the max 12.1 megapixels. You also get an astonishing 8x optical zoom (as opposed to digital zoom which is nothing to shout about) and a bargain price.
Around £150. More info here. Buy here.
Canon Ixus 120
Point-shooter for budding paparazzi that won’t make a bulge in your man-bag
A very thin thing indeed and a good choice if you want to carry a camera as well as all your other bits and bobs without hiring a pack-mule. Easy to tell it’s also aimed at the laydeez because, aside from butch black, it also comes in a variety of winsome pastel shades. Extremely high ‘mine’s bigger than yours’ megapixel count (12.1 since you ask), 4x optical zoom and a 28mm wide angle-lens for making photo-fatties out of the people on the ends of any line-up shots.
Around £190. More info here. Buy here.
Ricoh CX-3
Third and best iteration of high-end, high-powered compact.
Ricoh – who are these people? Why do they need an Arena in Coventry? Must have seemed like a good idea at the time. No, TF can’t quite believe it was ever a good plan to plough £10 million into a new gaff for the Sky Blues. In any event, they make very pleasing photographic utensils such as the CX-3. It has a 10.7x wide-angle zoom lens, a 10.6 megapixel sensor and can shoot 720p HD video. It’s a rival to Panasonic’s TZ range and costs about the same, which, for all its quality, might be an issue for all you ill-informed ‘stick with what you know’ photo-proles. Or not. The latest model is the CX-5 and the CX-3 has come down in price by about £100 since launch in Q1 2010.
Around £200. More info here. Buy here.
