Photo finishers: Perfect gift choices
ANDY IHNATKO ai@andyi.com
Canon's PowerShot SD140015
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I’m continuing my Holiday Gift Guide with the toughest category of the bunch: pocket cameras. I yearn for the days when there were only three models of digital cameras and two of them had the image quality of an Etch-A-Sketch. To simplify your shopping, I’ve boiled down the choices to three, based on price range.
Low budget
My favorite budget camera is Canon’s PowerShot SD1400IS, which is available for about $150. In the SD1400IS, Canon has made the perfect snapshot camera. It’s tiny, it’s very easy to use, and it takes fab photos. You just have to sacrifice some flexibility in the pursuit of great photos on a budget.
Medium budget
If you’re willing to spend about $250, you can expect to get a true family point-and-shoot that’ll deliver the goods under a wide range of conditions. That’s the prime definition of Panasonic’s Lumix DMC-ZS7, available online for about $260. It covers all of the conventional bases. It’s compact without being stupidly-so; the important buttons are big and easy to find. It has a powerful 12x zoom. There’s a full range of automatic, scene-specific, and manual shooting modes.
But the two features that truly make the ZS7 a standout. It has a very strong lens. Panasonic never loses sight of the fact that all the electronics in the world can’t improve an image that was already ruined by mediocre optics. And it has an exceptional HD movie mode. Unlike other cameras in its price range, the Lumix’ HD shooting mode doesn’t feel like an afterthought. You can rationally bring the ZS7 with you to an event with the intention of shooting video instead of photos.
Top budget
The top of the mark in a fixed-lens pocket camera costs $500. For that amount of cash, you should expect something that blurs the lines between a pocket camera and an SLR. To me, that means a camera that’s tremendously flexible, accepts accessories (like an external flash), is built extremely well — and whose controls are so well-considered and laid-out that you’ll never miss a shot while trying to access the right settings.
Enter: Nikon’s new Coolpix P7000. It’s small enough to fit into a pocket and yet it fills your hand nicely. And (here’s an important point) all of its buttons are large enough to be operated by human hands.
Buttons and knobs, I should say; Nikon put usability ahead of “clean, Euro styling.” As in a classic 35mm camera, its most useful settings are available by turning a knob. Moreover, its controls are customizable. You can take almost any feature out of the P7000’s onscreen menus and assign it to a dedicated function key on the front of the camera. You can save two whole groups of commonly-used settings (such as ISO 200; Tungsten white balance; face-priority autofocus; fill flash with −1 EV stops compensation) to special “user” slots on the function dial.
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