Help a camera addicted girl decide on a new Ultra Compact

[snoopygirl]

My brief intro:

I am in the fashion and rock and roll business. I've had several cameras over the years both for shooting product and for research ... oh yes, and fun too. My most recent camera purchase was a Konica Minolta A2. A fantastic camera for my studio work and even better suited for my purposes than a D70 was which had been my other consideration. It takes fantastic pictures, albeit with a bit more noise than I had hoped for but it belongs in the studio - not the bottom of a handbag.

My last handbag camera was a Nikon coolpix 775. To be honest, I carried it for a few years, used it nearly every day and loved it. It had a few features missing in the new ultra compacts like a good strong flash and excellent redeye reduction. That said, it was too big for most evening bags, couldn't fit decently into a pocket and took forever to the first shot by which time you'd have lost the moment.

In years past I have had many p & s 35mm cameras, I still own a very nice Nikon SLR and a very ancient Kodak DC120 which must be the granddaddy of digital! I've worked with large format Hasselblad and disposables and understand that the art is in the eye of the photog but a good lens and noise reduction are great allies in pursuit of perfection.

I have been reading all of the reviews and sites and this one seems the most 'friendly'. The reviews are well presented yet full of informative detail. I'm hoping some of you out there will have a great new idea for me I haven't already thought of! Here are my considerations as suggested at the top of the forum:

Budget - Having just spent a ridiculous amount of money on a pair of shoes I'll just say I have NO budget. Doesn't matter how much it costs, I'd rather the perfect camera than to make any sacrifice. How can I justify a $400 pair of shoes then scrimp on something I will no doubt use every single day.

Now ... that said, if I could find two cheap enough cameras I'd do that too. If price weren't an object at all I would probably get the Canon SD550 AND either the Fuji Finepix Z1 or the Samsung i5.

Size

Tiny. Needs to fit an evening bag, jeans pocket, etc. I will carry this camera everywhere I go. One thing I do with work is take pictures where perhaps I ought not to ... Being a rather slim girl a large camera in a back pocket will show!

Features

5+ mp, more concerned with image quality than giant megapixels. I have the Konica Minolta A2 for 'serious' stuff.

It is more important for me to have a wider lens than a zoomy one. I really love the 28mm focal length on my KM A2 for getting the entire party into one shot. Of course a zoopy zoom feature is nice too.

Manual controls would be a plus, I probably would rather manual ISO setting than anything else for a P&S.

General Usage

I will be using the camera both for work related research and fun so prints would be nice. Because I attend a lot of night events I really want either image stabilization or high ISO in order to avoid having to use flash at inappropriate moments. This is not a make or break however. Decent redeye is a major plus too.

Miscellaneous

I have been seriously considering the following models and below I have my own personal pros and cons for each:

Canon SD550:

pro- love the cool (but possibly silly) colour features and the image quality looks very nice.

con - no wide angle, ugly (sorry!), bigger than I had hoped for

Canon SD450:

as above but cheaper for smaller image files which might be just fine for my current purposes.

Panasonic DMC FX9:

pro - seems very well rounded, nice IS feature.

con - ugly, big, no zoom while making movies, no wide angle

Samsung Digimax i5:

pro - adorable in red (silly girl thing), very tiny

con - possible image quality issue, no wide angle

Fuji Finepix Z1:

pro - seems very solid, will withstand a few years at the bottom of a handbag, high ISO

con - possible image quality issue, no wide angle

Just today I read about the new Sony with the touch screen ... I'd wait for that in November but that leaves me without a camera and a 3 week trip to Italy, Prague, London and Dublin.

Some cameras I have considered and eliminatd for whatever reason are:

Casio EXZ750 (bad lcds, ugly) - all other Casios for picture quality, Nikon Coolpix S1 (bad picture quality), Sony DSC T5 (bad colour), DCS T7 (colour), Pansonic FX7 (battery life, poor lcd), Fuji Finepix F10 (too big but nice otherwise).

Sorry to be so long winded! Thanks!

Hilary aka Snoopygirl

[coldrain]

A quick short winded reply:

The Z1 is good in picture quality, and the ISO advantage is obvious. This one is indeed to be recommended, for its ISO, image quality and colour accuracy compared to form factor competition from minolta, sony and nikon.

That covers the iso...

Small form factor, there is a tiny jewel named the Canon Digital Elph SD30.
Like its predecessors (SD10/SD20) it has very good image quality but this time around it has a 2.5x zoom lens. (It is so small that the predecessors didnt have room for it). A very capable choice if size is important.
This is the one I would choose if I get a ultra compact.

That covers size...

Now the biggest problem of your list, wide angle. Most compacts start at about 36mm. Not exactly wide angle. My compact favorite with wide angle is the Canon PowerShot S60/S70, it is still quite compact and starts at 28mm. It is not so small to fit in a back pocket of a girls jeans through...
Maybe there is another more compact camera with good image quality that offers wide angle, but i can not think of it right now.

That covers wide angle... All in all, I think you will have to compromize. All 3 cameras mentioned above will please you with their image quality, and AGAIN i was longer winded than I expected to be.

[snoopygirl]

The wide angle Canons are simply too big / heavy. Further research has let me to the Ricoh R3 which is due out soon. I've yet to find even one review of it however as it is so new.

I'm really leaning towards buying the SD450 at this point and keeping the $100 I save over the SD550 for my next camera down the road.

I've looked at the SD30 and the fact that it costs more than the sd450 puts me off. Also I need something which I can have in hand by Oct. 13th. It's cute though, esp. in gold. Funny that the SD550 in gold is bug ugly!

All of the review pictures of the Fuji Finepix Z1 look a little fuzzy to me. Do you think this is a better choice than the IS on the Panasonic FX9?

Thanks!

[Rambler358]

If I was in the market for a new pocket digicam, I'd seriously consider Kodak's new Easyshare One with the 3" tilt/swivel/touchscreen LCD. It's not cheap, but still the one I'd likely get.

[coldrain]

You are right in that the canon S70 is a bit big, I mentioned that too. Ricoh does make interesting cameras that always focus fast, with sony they have the fastest focussing compact cameras on the market.

One drawback does Ricoh seem to have model range after model range, and that is that the colour noise is higher than normal. They do not seem to have colour noise reduction under control. This of course does bring the image quality down.

The Ricoh Caplio R2 (5mp and a little bigger) was tested in the (by me highly rated) german magazine Computer Foto of September 2005. It's 28mm-135mm lens (f3.3-4.8)
did fine in the distortion area, but vignetted very strongly in the wide angle range.

Colour noise was also much too high, in the base ISO value it already was with 1.7% more than average, at ISO 200 it was already 2.6%, a value you see normally at double sensitivity (ISO 400). ISO 400 and 800 were hardly usable according to them.

They also questioned the production control or lens design because theirs had a strange metalic buzzing sound during zooming.

As minus points they listed: Strong colour noise, Strong vignetting, unsharp at edges, buzzing metalic noise, no optical viewfinder.

Since I think the R3 uses the same type of lens with even bigger range (so the vignetting and unsharpness probably are there), and probably has the Ricoh illness of too high colour noise, I do not think the R3 will be a big success for Ricoh and I would not recommend it.

If you photograph things or people that move, the Fuji's sensitivity is a plus. If you on the other hand mainly photograph still objects/people, the FX9's IS is a help too.

If I look on the photo example pages of Jeffs reviews of the same subjects (the pointy tower one is a favorite of min to quickly see what a camera is capable of) I find the FX9 to have much more colour noise (purple and green pixels all over the concrete, very noisy sky), i do not see much colour noise with the Z1 at all. Also the FX9 seems to have a lot more CA, i really prefer the Z1's image quality judging by those photos.

[snoopygirl]

wow coldrain! You've just knocked another off my consideration list. The FX9 photos DO seem to show a lot of colour noise and I don't know the technical term for it but anywhere in the image there are a lot of lines (windows, etc.) there seems to be noise along them. I looked at a few other sites and the excess noise is definitely a factor for elimination. It seems Panasonic has gone downhill from the FX7 which actually produced a sharper image.

I'm interested to know if there are any changes to the Nikon S3 from the S1 beyond more megapixels. I was singularly unimpressed with the S1 I had purchased a few months ago and returned it almost immediately.

Having had a real go through the image galleries I am coming to a couple of conclusions:

1) I can't have it all! lol. I will be buying two cameras.

2) I either need to buy a bigger camera or WAIT if I want a wide angle. Suggestions for *slightly* bigger cameras will be appreciated.

The images from the Samsung Digimax i5 actually looked better and sharper to me than the Fuji Finepix Z1 though both looked FAR better than the images from the Panasonic DMC FX9. What I noticed is that the Samsung was more likely to have blown out areas in bright sunlight but looked really nice without much noise in other situations. Of course it doesn't have the all important high ISO setting.

That all said, the image quality of the Canon SD550 blew all of them away. I might be starting to think I am better off to sacrifice a little in terms of size and cute factor for now and the high ISO setting as well. I wish there was a gallery for the SD450 for comparisong but I did look at the similary SD400 which looked pretty good.

Ah but ... all this looking has brought me nothing but misery. Look at this:

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2005_reviews/c5.html

Kinda neato!

I would probably be better off to focus at work and just buy the first thing I see. :)

[Atindra]

May be Kodak V550 appeal you. It has got very good reviews and barring its battery life, its scoring on all the other matters over its competitors.
Atindra