I’ve recently got myself a new camera. I got this one to serve a purpose: mobility. This camera will allow me to take great photos while I’m on the run.
The camera is a compact camera, but not the smallest one on the market. It packs itself into a body thats 105.8 x 59.3 x 31.9mm, and as you can see from the photos the lens has a bit of that with a circular extend.
The body feels great to me. It’s a little tricky to get the power button depressed, but thats ok, I have enough capabilities as a human to depress the power button with my fingernail…. The flash pops up automatically at startup it seems, which is a bit annoying. I’m not a fan of flash, so I end up just popping it down, which kind of feels a bit like I might break it but then nicely closes. Simply placing your finger over the flash at startup cancels it from coming up. Easy.
The rate at which the auto feature adjusts the light condition is a little bit slow. I’m used to adjusting it manually with my other cameras, so it’s nice to see it adjust itself for me, albeit it takes around 2-4 seconds to adjust.
There are a tonne of built in features that this camera has, that I won’t even attempt to get into. But they are for the most part fairly generic to all point and shoot cameras like this.
The coolest thing about this camera is that it has a 35mm equivalent zoom that goes from 28-392mm. Thats pretty astounding to me. It’s one of the wildest range of zoom out there by any camera really. In fact, thats why I bought it. That and the great reviews it received.
The LCD screen is 3-inches horizonally. It’s nice and big. From the photo just above, you can see it has 14.1Mpixels. That’s a nice size.
The image stabilizing on it is pretty amazing. It’s a very great feature to have on a camera so that when you’re out of breath, or getting nervous for taking a photograph of somebody or something holding up traffic or forcing people to hold a smile for you, all the shaking that comes with it is somewhat taken out by the IS built in to the camera.
The menu, and features on the camera, and how to set the functions is familiar to myself for I’m already a big Canon fan. So anybody thats used to the Canon menus and scroll wheel will be able to handle this easily.
That little nob at the top there between the shutter release and the on/off button in the image above is the zoom knob. If you push it to the left, it zooms out (three trees) and to the right it zooms in (one tree).
The lens cover, it doesn’t come with a lens cap ( I don’t think I’ve ever seen a point and shoot that has) is interesting. It is held together by light springs, so if you put your finger into it, you can wiggle your finger and easily open up the ‘closed’ cover to expose the lens. It does snap back into place. I’m not sure why they have it this way. To me, a good camera is one that will protect the lens very well and sturdy when not in use, it seems that this leaves room for a lot of random things to get in there. For me, I bought it to carry with me everywhere, so I’ll be having it in my backpack all the time, which means that random things may get into there. I’m contemplating getting a case for it, which I don’t really like to do for it slows capturing the moment down a bit… All this said, the actual lens inside has a glass flat cover thats not the lens itself that protects the lens, although I think it would be just as harmful to get that scratched, for its implanted in the camera, and wouldn’t be easy to get out like a screw on filter would be (found on higher end camera lenses).
All in all, I’m excited with my new toy. To everything there is always one or two things that a person can complain about, but the quality of the pictures its taking is great.