Digicams

For most of us digicams are our first introduction into the world of digital cameras. In the past they were the only affordable types of digital cameras made, indeed they were virtually the only type, apart from a few extremely expensive alternatives, which were fine if you had the odd £15,000 - £20,000 to spare!

Today the situation is rather different. Digital cameras in general, and digicams in particular, are very much mainstream products sold on every high street, and at prices that even a couple of years ago would have seemed unattainable. Basic 5/6mp digicams are now sold at prices of around £100 or less, whereas a few years ago a 5mp model was viewed as cutting edge and commanded a price of about £800. 

This is the way prices and specifications of new electronic goods in general change over time. When the technology is new prices are high and specification is modest. As sales of the product rise the price drops and the specification increases, well sometimes but not always. In some cases price drops are allied to a drop in specification, so the goods can be made more cheaply. In the case of digital cameras prices have dropped overall, whilst some have dropped much further than others due to specification reductions. 

Sometimes buying the cheapest product available isn't always the best option. If you have looked at our page on        Digital Camera Basics  you'll have a brief idea of what most digicams can offer. This page is intended to be a short guide to the different types of digicam available, and what to look out for when buying one, as well a a bit of history thrown in for perspective.

One point. All through our pages you will see references to lens focal lengths. These are all given, not in the actual focal lengths the camera's lenses have, but in the 35mm equivalents, as this is what most people are familiar with and can relate to. The vast majority of digital cameras also state these figures for the same reason, it's become the convention to do so. To understand fully why digital cameras all have different focal length lenses we would ask you to refer to our pages on  Digital Camera Lenses  but basically it's because they all use different size sensors. Please refer to  Sensors  for more information on this aspect.

Early Cameras

Here's an example of one of the early 'affordable' digicams from 1999, a Kodak DC215. It has a 1mp sensor, a fixed focus f4-f4.5. 29-58mm zoom lens, auto-exposure, an optical viewfinder, 3 flash modes (on/off/red eye reduction), a macro mode and self timer, and uses 4 AA batteries. Quite basic, with few options compared to many of today's models, at £250 it was seen as something of a breakthrough at the time as far as price was concerned, and 13 images can be saved at the highest quality settings on the 4mb memory card that came with it. The images it produces are best printed at either 4"x 3" or 5¼"x 4". Anything larger and the image becomes 'pixelated' - the pixels begin to be seen..

Kodak DC215 1mp digicam

It's design is quite boxy but clean cut, and the body is all metal. It's got a small LCD info panel on the top which is quite handy as its a pain if you have to continually switch on the rear LCD to check a camera's status, which is the case with many present day types. It makes using them much slower. Another bonus is the relatively small number of buttons required in using it, leaving plenty of space either side to hold it. This is another point to watch, some present designs have so many buttons placed all over them that its often difficult to hold them without pressing one. This is especially true of the very small designs around. They seem to have been designed more as fashion accessories rather than proper cameras. 

Newer designs

By way of comparison here is a camera that could be described as its modern day equivalent in general terms, although this is also now quite old, but the basic design holds good. This is a Pentax Optio 33L from 2003. It has a 3mp sensor, a  f2.6-f5.0 38-114mm auto-focus zoom lens, no viewfinder, but instead a swiveling multi-position LCD screen. Although it still only has auto-exposure, almost everything else can be altered to suit. Metering, ISO, flash, white balance etc. It uses 2 AA batteries or a CR-V3 lithium cell. At highest settings just 8 shots can be saved on the 16mb memory card originally supplied with it.

Pentax 33L 3mp digicam

A slimmer all plastic design this has neither a top LCD panel or optical viewfinder and the rear LCD screen must be on in order to use it, but all the information needed overlays the on-screen image view. There are several digicams using this type of multi-position LCD and one of the advantages is that they can be angled at a position to suit the user.  Hold the camera above your head with the screen angled down, or down on the ground with the screen facing up, even reversed so the screen faces the front for self portraits.

Neat and tidy, and with room to place your hands to hold, it takes about 5 seconds to power-up, and the same time to zoom the lens from it's widest setting to maximum telephoto. Autofocus is accurate but not particularly quick, and this is another common feature of digicams, which are not best suited to taking action or quick 'pot shots'. Press the shutter, and by the time the camera is ready and takes the shot, the subject has moved. The delay between taking shots, while they write the image just taken to memory, called the recovery rate, is also quite long, and can be frustrating if you are missing shots while this happens. Most digicams are not capable of taking shots at the same time as they are writing images to memory. Some can have continuous shooting, but only at very low resolutions, and they usually don't write to memory until the shots are taken, with a correspondingly longer recovery time before more can be taken.

Larger digicams

Although one of the main advantages of digicams are their compact size, and there are now those that can be slipped into a shirt pocket, not all of them are quite that small, the prosumer models with their large zoom lenses and SLR like designs, whilst not being huge are still a fair size, and some equal the size of the smallest DSLR's. 

One of these, and also one of the first 3mp digicams ever made, a landmark at the time, was the Epson 3000z  from autumn 2000.  A chunky design it's notable for it's minimal design layout which gives access to it's large range of modes and options via a series of buttons located around it's LCD, which can be altered whilst in shooting mode. A problem that many digicams have is that their designers often bury the options they have in menu's only accessible using the LCD in setup mode, and its an awkward and long winded approach to have to continually switch modes just to alter simple settings such as white balance, ISO or metering, when you are trying to judge which setting to use. The camera was the first to broadly mimic the basic design of SLR's and although chunky was small as digicams then went. It set a design trend that most cameras followed in one form or another.

Epson 3000z 3mp digicam

The 3000z is also notable for it's fast f2-f2.5 35-105mm zoom lens and flash hot-shoe, which very few have, enabling external flashguns, studio lights and other accessories to be used with it. Combined with the lens adaptor that Epson supplied it meant that filters and other lens additions could also be used. There are a small number that now have similar options, as well as offering supplementary wide-angle and telephoto lenses. However the models now featuring wider zoom ranges are sometimes a better option in this particular respect.

Epson 3000z with lens adaptor & UV filter fitted

Although Epson were one of the original makers of digital cameras, and produced some very good digicams giving high quality images, they no longer make them as a general rule, although the odd one appears from time to time. So many companies now market digicams that in 2001/2002 Epson felt it not worthwhile to continue, and now concentrate mainly on their printers. It's a great shame as the 3000z produces image quality few digicams can equal today, even with much higher resolutions. It's down to the use of a high quality lens, marked Epson but reputedly made by Carl Zeiss, and very good image processing. 

As a matter of interest Epson is part of Epson-Sekio. Sekio are well known for watch manufacture. Less well known is that they make most of the shutter assemblies used in SLR cameras and have done so for many years. These are now used of course, in most DSLR's.

One camera of recent times that has similar specifications to the Epson is Canon's G6. One in a line of G models Canon has produced over the years - the latest is the G9 -  it had a 7mp sensor and fast lens similar to the Epson's It also had a multi-position flip out and twist LCD screen. The image quality it produced set the standard for this type of digicam, and its certainly for those serious about photography but wanting something smaller than a DSLR but with a reasonable set of features.

Canon G6 7mp digicam

Digicams with large zooms

In order to dispense with the need to use additional lenses to extend the usefulness of the integral lenses fitted to digicams, there has been an increasing number produced with zooms that have quite wide ranges such as 28-200 and 35-300. 

One of the smallest of the telephoto zoom digicams to have been made is Nikon's 8mp Coolpix 8700. Broadly similar to designs from other makers it also had a twist and flip LCD screen as well as an EVF viewfinder, which is very useful when the camera is on a tripod,  You can angle the screen up to view it rather than having to bend down to look through the viewfinder, another positive feature over a DSLR.

Nikon Coolpix 8700 8mp digicam

As a general rule of thumb, when a shot is taken the shutter speed used should at least match the focal length of the lens, if camera shake resulting in a blurred image is to be avoided. So when taking a shot at say 30mm, 1/30th of a second is the minimum speed to use, at 200mm, 1/200th or above, and at 370mm, 1/370th or greater is required.  Most exposure modes take the focal length of the lens in to account when setting the correct exposure. But except in very good light levels, the higher shutter speeds  needed for the long telephoto lenses with their slow maximum apertures are quite difficult to obtain, so in these conditions setting a higher ISO is required to get them. But in the main most digicams have low ISO's and even these give high noise levels. So getting a sharp shot is really a matter of luck and a steady hand, or resting the camera somewhere steady. Using a beanbag or tripod is often the only answer in these circumstances.

Minolta attempted to solve the problem of camera shake at slow shutter speeds by fitting their Dimage A1 prosumer digicam with an anti-shake sensor, which attempts to compensate for camera movement as a shot is taken. Results proved that it did work within certain limits. Consuming a fair bit of power, it could be switched on or off as needed. Minolta, or Konica-Minolta as the company later became known, went on to produce several models in this range the last of which was the A200, a cut down version of the A2. Here are two shots of the A1/A2 models. The A1 was 5mp and the A2 8mp, with the design being otherwise identical. As you might notice in the shots the lens fitted to the A1/A2/A200 is a 28-200mm with manual zooming. This is much quicker in use than a digicam that has a power zoom. There is also a manual focusing option. Quite a few of the larger digicams have lenses like this.

Minolta A1 5mp / A2 8mp digicam

Konica-Minolta are now no longer involved in camera or film manufacture. The assets were sold to Sony who are now a major force in digital camera manufacture besides supplying many makers with sensors. The anti-shake sensor design which Minolta introduced has however stood the test of time, and besides being now used in Sony digicams and DSLR's, similar anti-shake sensor concepts are used in many digital cameras of all types from a wide range of makers.

Several makers have used IS lenses [image stabilizing] lenses in their digicams as an alternative method of countering camera shake, and there are quite a few DSLR lenses that use this method. However there is no doubt that higher ISO speeds are easier and more convenient, and consume no extra power, as the other methods do.

A problem that especially affects digicams is noise levels at high ISO's due to the small size of the sensors used in them. This has been exacerbated of late by the move to lenses which have ever greater focal ranges and the need to use ever higher ISO settings to overcome camera/lens shake and the reason why anti-shake now features in many cameras.

Recently Fuji introduced a digicam with a wide ISO range 100-1600, almost as wide as the best DSLR's, and the lowest noise levels of any digicam to date. Whilst the noise levels aren't as low as from DSLR's it's a huge improvement especially considering the sensor is 9mp. With a 28-300mm lens the camera is a good alternative to a basic DSLR, although size wise it's the same as the small entry-level DSLR's. It's unusual these days in that it uses AA batteries and Compactflash memory, whereas most seem to use dedicated battery packs and SD memory. This gives it in our view, great advantages over other similar digicams, please refer to  Batteries  and  Memory Cards  to understand why we think so. Here is a view of it.

Fuji S9500 9mp digicam

Some of the biggest digicams to date in terms of size, weight and sensor resolution have been made by Sony, using lenses made by Carl Zeiss, as most Sony cameras do. The last large design to arrive was the R1, and set new standards as it used a 10.3mp sensor the same size as those used in many DSLR's, the APS-C size. It was also a first for digicams in that the sensor was a CMOS type rather than the CCD type that others use. Up until now the lenses have been fast, wide ranging F2-2.5 28-200mm zooms, but because of the size of the sensor the lens in the R1 is a F2.8-4.8 24-120mm. This is again a first as no digicam before has featured a lens with so wide a view at the wide angle end, and although the lens is slower than previous lenses it's still a lot faster than those available for DSLR's. Once again zooming is manual and manual focusing is an option. It has a large range of features but It's also quite a bit larger and heavier than several of the smaller DSLR's. Here is a shot of it.

Today the range of digicams made is wide, and available to suit every taste and occasion, from those able to be slipped into handbag/purse or shirt/trouser pocket, to those that could be considered as an alternative to a DSLR. One aspect that seems common is that sensor capture rates have risen quite dramatically, and are anywhere between 6mp-12mp. Another is that fewer 'prosumer' digicams, those looked upon as an alternative to a DSLR, are now made, one reason being that they were becoming just too big, as with Sony's R1, whilst entry-level DSLR's became both smaller and cheaper.

For general day-to-day use, holidays and special occasions, they have specifications that often make them unbeatable to use, and worlds away from the experience of a film compact camera. Whilst some will say that a DSLR is better, many who have bought a digicam find that it is all they ever need.