travel camera, help please

[caroline nixon]

Hi, help much appreciated!
I want a camera to take good quality travel photos - mostly landscape and portrait rather than interiors. Sometimes want to enlarge to 8" x10".Would quite like image stabiliser if possible, though main consideration is image quality

Have used a canon EOS30 with IS zoom till now.
Would prefer my first digital camera to be lighter and with fixed lens, but still want manual control.
Was looking at 8 mp cameras and pretty much narrowed down to Konica minolta dimage A200 or Olympus 8080.

However, have now spotted Fuji 9500 but can find very few reviews.
Also many reviews suggest that I might get just as good picture quality with canon G6.


Now completely confused!!!

[John_Reed]

LOVE them, according to a poll taken over on dpreview (http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1033&message=15142818) recently. If you're used to a Canon with an IS lens attached, the FZ30 will seem teensy by comparison; in fact the camera is so well balanced, my wife thinks it's lighter than our prior FZ15, which it outweighs by 1/2 pound. I think it would be great as a travel camera, both for outdoor long-zoom shots, and also for shots inside museums and art galleries, where the image stabilizer lets you click off shots at 1/10 of a second or so with good success rates. Not only does it have a full set of manual controls, including manual zoom, usually found only on dSLRs, but it also does very well in the automatic modes, and has a fully automatic "A" mode, where the camera does practically ALL the thinking for you, lest you get intimidated by all the manual stuff. It's extremely versatile; I do use it for its 8MP capacity occasionally, but I also love the lower-res (5MP & 3MP) "EZ" modes, which give you optical zoom range out to 668mm (19.1X) in the 3MP EZ mode. Check it out!

[coldrain]

The FZ30 has serious issues with noise, its 8mp sensor is letting an other wise nice camera down.

The G6 you mention has very good image quality, it is one of the very best digital "compacts". Most 8 mp camera's are a bit noisy, but the FZ30 is very noisy even in that group. The Olympus 8080 is better in that respect.

The Fuji 9500 looks to be promissing, but it is so new reviews are not out yet. It has a 9mp sensor, but it will not have the bad noise problem you see with the FZ30.

Then there is a group of smaller cameras with image stabilization, where the Canon S2 IS and Sony H1 are compact and good.

What do you want most, in a traveling camera? Zoom range or wide angle possibility.

If you want a wide(r) angle lens for landscapes, the selection of cameras is even different.

There is a good Olympus that goes to 28mm, a good Nikon that goes to 24mm (i think it is the 8400) and there is the compact and good Canon S60/S70 that goes down to 28mm, among others

[caroline nixon]

thanks for the help

I really do need both of the ends of the range - I take quite a lot of buildings of Pagodas etc, where 35 mm at least is essential, but like to have the telephoto end for candid shots . that's one of the reasons the A200 appelaed, the range is just about right.
I don't want to be medssing about with converters.

Can anyone explain the noise problem ? It seems to be an issue with most 8 mp cameras, why is not with the 7 mp G6, and not with the 9 mp fuji?

[coldrain]

Can anyone explain the noise problem ? It seems to be an issue with most 8 mp cameras, why is not with the 7 mp G6, and not with the 9 mp fuji?

Sensor elements need a certain amount of light to give accurate results. The less light they get, the more "noisy" results can be (meaning you get with more pixels results that are not correct, making colours and brightness uneven).
Some sensor designs and models are more noisy than others, it depends on a lot of things, including who fabricated and designed them.

The 8mp sensors pack more elements on the same space, the elements are smaller and therefor get less light. They tend to be the noisiest sensors, the 6 and 7mp ones often used seem to be of better design than the current compact camera 8mp ones.

Fuji has a new sensor range with a neat trick, in stead of one element per pixel, they put 2 per pixel on there, of different sizes. Even though the elements get less light, there are two, with different sensitivity. By adding the results of both elements they get a much bigger dynamic range and equal out the less accurate results quite effectively.

The 9mp sensor of Fuji seems therefor to perform much better than the very noisy sensor of the Panasonic FZ30. The 5 and 6mp sensors on the same fuji sensor range perform better than their competitors, where noise is concerned.