List Price: $229.00
Sale Price: $182.00
Today's Bonus: 21% Off
Background: Hobbyist photographer, other cameras are a Nikon D300 and a Nikon D40 with a plethora of lenses. Main purpose for buying this P&S is for lightweight travel and taking it to restaurants, etc w/o the bulkiness of a DSLR, and a camera that I could hand to someone else to take a photo of me + family, you cant do that with a DSLR.
I took this camera on a 10 day road trip to Disneyland and San Diego, I took several hundreds pictures with it and something like 30 videos so my review is based on this experience.
Pros:
size. its small enough to carry with you yet beefy enough to use with big hands, as far as P&S go, this is a great size, in comparison, the new Canons are just too small for big hands.
fast autofocus (instant when outdoors).
scenes work (but read cons).
battery life for photo taking is not horrible.
Cons:
absolutely horrible battery life when taking video. If you take three five minute videos, prepare to not have a full day of battery, taking video EATS the battery.
scene mode: They take too long to select and you cant change the ISO on them, which means you'll get grainy pictures.
flash: it really is too underpowered, you cant take a family photo 4 feet from the camera at night, true, you can fix it later, but, still, flash could be WAY better.
16M photo size: When using this size, the write speed to the card is horrendous, almost unusable for some of us (even with top of the line sd cards), my recommendation, use the 12M setting, the size is big enough for big prints and you get good write speeds.
charging trough USB. I prefer taking out a battery than removing a rubber gasket to connect a usb cable., however, it charges pretty fast.
odd focusing; I don't know if this is an issue with MY camera, but mine back focuses too much, (back focusing refers to: you focus on someone's faces, the focus point shows where it focused but then the focus point on the photo is actually behind the point you wanted, making the photo unusable)
lack of photo info: when taking a photo, it doesnt show you what ISO was used when using Scenes, which means you have to zoom into the pic to see if its usable, this is a big flaw in my opinion.
Conclusion:
This is not a P7100 or a Canon G12, this is a basic P&S that does one thing good, be basic (and the price proves it). Do not expect to be blown away by the quality of the pictures unless you took them outdoors and forced the ISO to be 200 or below, everything else will be good enough pictures. Would I recommend it? I guess I will with the caveats I mentioned, with the case logic travel case you can put it on your belt and have it with you all the time, thats a big bonus. Case Logic TBC-302 Ultra Compact Camera Case with Storage (Black)
UPDATE: Tips & Tricks:
Two scenes work really good: Night Landscape & Sports (outdoors), the rest, not so much.
Change the photo size to 12M, it gives you a 4000 x 3000 sized picture, enough for most size prints, and the camera feels way faster with that setting on.
ISO 200 is really clean, if you can, leave it there, ISO 400 is not as good.
0 comments:
Post a Comment