Compact, affordable, performing!

 Three words that can definite what camera system I have been looking for ever tirelessly for the last four or five past decades. First during the analog-film era and thereafter with the promising introduction of the digital photography. Have we reached this goal today? In one way, yes because there are good performing compact digital camera systems available to the enthusiasms or even the professionals that are looking for it.

The true is that even though this achievement has been reached in the past decade, we are still looking for improvement if not another big technological breakthrough even if necessity cannot entirely justify it. The popularity of “doing photography” has exploded in particular with the event of the multi-task cellular phone and their constant performance improvements. The debate to know if all those pictures will be shared or edited and archived is another think to consider but we can leave that for another for-coming discussion.

What we are looking, at least for some of us, from the technological evolution point of view, is the ability to design smaller competent real cameras (yes, with a true viewfinder and a practical ergonomic interface) that are small enough to be bring with us without any size dimensions and weight annoyance. Over my modest experience as a everyday photographer, I have concluded that for the traditional film-analog era, the 35mm format was one of the finest compact (manual focus only) camera design (that assessment have deteriorated later when the autofocus and motorized models have appeared). For digital photography, I have fully embraced the Micro Four Third image sensor format for the obvious reasons of the camera-lens combination size and weight. We can say almost the same for the APS-C sensor format although this particular combination is in fact a bit more bulky.

There is always the famous image quality debate raging between the smaller sizes image sensor formats especially concerning the so-call Full-Frame (religious) adepts but you can choose to completely ignore them knowing that the most vindicative of them seem to have a problem to concentrate themselves for producing and sharing their own pictures😉.

At the end, a new dream camera is no longer part of my everyday though since the actual photo manufacturer offers should satisfy most of the photographer’s needs for a compact, affordable and competent photo (primarily designed for) device.

Photo-illustration Daniel M