Compact cameras, the best of the best… for travelling

There are thousands of compact cameras on the market, so many functions and facilities with numerous options and settings to confuse even me; a seasoned photographer. So I would like to share with you the main features that always catch my eye when technology continues to better itself.

Compact Digital Cameras struggle to produce decent wide-angle images; most are about 34mm at their widest angle. In the old days of film this setting would have been a standard lens for reportage work.

Wide–angle: A compact zoom lens that can reproduce images at a 28mm setting will enable you to cover more area from any given point. 28mm is ideal for atmospheric interiors or group shots in tight locations. But then any lens at 28mm could show serious distortion at its edges. Carl Ziess created the best-engineered lenses for the Leica film camera range. So for me lenses that are wide-angle and built to the standard of Leica lenses will always catch my interest.

Megapixels: The bigger the better…Why? Because any shots taken with a large megapixel camera will enable you to earn money, should you choose to place your travel shots into a library (Alamy.com for example). On the internet you don’t need such a large megapixel camera but if you would like to have that work reproduced in print at a later stage the bigger the megapixel camera the better the quality. Example a 14-megapixel camera takes 14 million bites of a photograph; this figure enables the digital camera to store greater colour detail in the form of graduation of colours and enables the user to enlarge photographs at much greater enlargements.

Film speed setting: The images sensors in compact digital cameras tends to be of a quality that is optimised for Good light so the current downfall in all digital cameras is their poor ability in low light situations. Therefore I would recommend never setting the film speed on your digital camera anything more than 200 iso. The image sensors in professional 35mm digital cameras tend to cope with low light conditions better and have a reputation of not showing any visible degradation between 100 & 400 iso. Until I can find a compact that has this ability I will not use and film setting faster than 200 iso.

I currently own a Panasonic 14.7 megapixel camera the Lumix FX150. It’s not as expensive as a Leica compact camera, but it does use the same lenses that are in Leica’s compact range. It’s 28mm wide-angle, has an aperture of f2.8, which allows more light into the camera than most. It can record photographs with its ‘raw’ setting this enables me to capture the maximum dynamic range of a photograph (A jpeg is a process interpretation) and has OK sound when used in its video setting, this is ideal for my YouTube blogs.