New Point and Shoot meets AFL at the Dome

May 23, 2008 by rockportrait

I’d like to talk about the long and arduous process I put myself through in choosing a suitable point and shoot camera for my upcoming travels. I own two Canon DLSRs and an old Powershot S50, but I wasn’t prepared to lug a big body and even bigger and expensive lenses all around Asia for 53 days.

Oh – yes, I’m leaving my office job and travelling through seven countries from June until August. You’ll be able to read (I hope) a daily blog update from me, including photos, once I kick it off.

Back to my shopping challenges. I originally wanted to take the camera scuba diving, so had almost settled on the Canon G9 – it’s compact, the best quality money can buy in a P&S (point and shoot), offers most of the professional features of an SLR, and is able to be matched with a number of professional waterproof housings. However, it only offers a 35-210mm lens or something like that. The telephoto is OK for travel, but you can’t shoot landscapes and large buildings without a wider lens. Whilst researching the Canon I fell in love with the Panasonic Lumix FZ18 as soon as I picked it up, but was worried about the size of the body and the lower quality of image. After trying it out for a couple of days I have nothing to worry about. No, it won’t fit in my pocket, but I intend to be using it all day anyway.

Those of you who know much about P&S’s will realise that their sensors are very small, and with the large amount of pixels shoved onto these sensors the resultant images are usually quite noisy. However, the FZ18 limits the sensor to a reasonable 8Mpx, and cleverly drops it further to 6 or 5 if it has to salvage image quality in lower light situations. From a practical standpoint, a quality Leica lens offers 28-500 – a fantastic range for travel photography, and the camera incorporates a bunch of excellent travel-related features that will make my life much easier. Features such as voice and text tagging, timezone management, fast and intelligent auto settings, lightening auto-focus, custom modes, RAW, full manual control and an incredible anti-shake mechanism (isn’t shooting handheld at 1/15 and 500mm, and getting tack sharp results science fiction?) mean I’ll be able to concentrate on taking photos and enjoying my trip, and worry less about the technical aspects of photography.

Initially I decided not to bother shooting whilst diving, as there is no dedicated waterproof housing available for the Panasonic, however I recently discovered the EWA-Marine range of underwater and all-weather bags. These fit pretty much any camera type with the use of a lens adaptor, so one of those is winging it’s way to me now.

I took the Panasonic for a test drive at the Carlton v Brisbane game last week, and as you can see from the results, I was able to get right in amongst it from way up in the stands. There is a reasonable amount of noise at these higher ISO’s, but you know what? I don’t care. Unless I am planning to enlarge and print an image, the intention is to capture an event and I think this camera does a very good job in almost every circumstance.

The Fev on the lead