A Compendium of Compromised Compacts 28 May 2019

I am a long time enthusiast user of advanced compact cameras  especially when I am travelling or in a social setting or gathering of people.

The better (read “more expensive”) compacts hold out the promise of image quality equal to that of interchangeable lens models but in a much smaller package for ease of carrying and inconspicuous presence when in use.

In the film days I had at different times a Contax T2, Ricoh GR1v and Konica Hexar. Each of these was capable of excellent output on 35mm film.

Others like the Olympus [mju] were less expensive yet capable of making decent pictures in the right hands.

My very first digital camera was a Canon S70 clamshell compact in 2004 which could produce good pictures at some focal lengths if the light was right.

In their heyday between 2004-2010 camera makers churned out millions of basic low cost consumer zoom compacts every year.

Then the camera industry was hit with a double whammy.

The first was smart-phones.

The first mobile phone with an inbuilt camera was the Sharp J-SH04 of the year 2000.

Early iterations of the phone-with-built-in-camera were a bit basic and no threat to the established camera industry.  

That changed with the with the first iPhone which arrived in 2007.  Smartphones now have such sophisticated camera capability they have made the previously ubiquitous budget compact camera redundant.

The second was the global financial crisis starting in  2008. 

Total camera sales rose to a peak of around 120 million units per year between 2008-2010. In 2018 that number had fallen to less than 20 million with most of  the fall occurring in the fixed lens category, most of which is compacts.

The rest are bridge models with a built in EVF and a superzoom lens, making them too large to be usefully described as “compact”.

Camera sales in 2018-2019 have fallen to around 1985 levels.

The reader might wonder why there is not more panic among camera makers about this situation.  Of course I cannot read their corporate minds but I suspect they are hoping the market will stabilise at a level sufficient to support an industry making high value interchangeable lens models, the sale of which is less likely to be adversely impacted by smartphones, tablets and other non-camera devices.

My quest has been to find a compact, but not necessarily pocketable camera with the capability, performance and image quality of a mid range interchangeable lens model with a high quality lens (preferably a zoom). In essence this means a collapsing type multi-barrel lens  which can retract back into the camera body when powered off.

For me it is essential that the camera be engaging in character with a very well designed user interface and excellent ergonomics.

This quest has failed in the sense that none of the many compacts which I have bought and used  met my requirements.

Am I overly fussy ?  Yes of course I am but that’s OK.

So here are the cameras which I have used and a few which I would like to have seen but were never made, in alphabetical order by manufacturer.

Canon  After the S70 I had a string of G models including if memory serves correctly the G7, G9, G12 and G16. These generally represented state-of-the-art for consumer zoom compacts in the year in which each was released. The main problem with all of them was the dreadful little optical viewfinder which was almost worse than useless. Most used the then popular 9.3mm diagonal (so-called 1/1.7 inch) sensor which was subsequently abandoned in favour of the larger 15.9 chip for better image quality.

Then came a G1X (the original version)  I have to say this was a bit of a disaster. It had a nice handle but was otherwise a big disappointment. Worst of all it had that optical viewfinder carried over from the older G series when it should have had a good quality EVF.

I skipped the G1X.2 but bought a G1X.3.  This is a current model and a vast improvement over the two previous G1X attempts. I rate the G1X.3 as an “almost-got-it-right” model. Canon managed to fit a very sharp 3x zoom, a 27mm diagonal  (APS-C) sensor, nice EVF on the optical axis and a fully articulating monitor into a very compact package with acceptable ergonomics. In the event I elected not to keep this camera because

* The (Canon) 27mm sensor delivers only marginally better imaging performance than the Sony 15.9mm sensor in other compacts from Canon, Sony and Panasonic. Because of this the almost identically designed Canon G5X with the 15.9 sensor makes more sense as a camera. It allows a wider aperture, longer zoom range lens. Unfortunately the actual lens used by Canon on the G5X and G7X/G7X.2 is mediocre with poor sharpness at the edges at the wide end and inconsistent sharpness elsewhere in the zoom range.

* The G1X.3 lens although very sharp is also very prone to CA/purple/green fringing at high contrast edges. This can be difficult to correct in RAW files and in the process the dreaded grey fringing can be produced.  I was not amused to discover this, which by the way has not been reported by any reviewer to my knowledge.

I briefly owned a G7X.2 thinking it might make a suitable compact travel camera. But it has that same buggy lens as the G5X and the lack of an EVF made viewing in strong sunlight more difficult than I like.

If Canon were to produce a revised G5X with a completely re-designed lens and a big processor upgrade and a few other problem fixes they could potentially have themselves the ideal compact camera.

Will this ever happen ?

Right now Canon looks to me like a lost and rudderless organisation. Canon’s product output seems like a scattergun approach to model selection with no clear plan which I can see other than a general sense of wanting to “cover the market”.   I guess that is fine but Canon is doing it with a collection of half baked products which have little appeal to me.

Fujifilm has a long history of making “interesting” cameras, often seeking market niches not filled by the main players and  in the process offering cameras which are deliberately “different” from the norm.

In 2012  I bought a Fuji X10 compact. This had Fuji’s trademark X-Trans sensor and some typically idiosyncratic Fuji characteristics. The X10 had the unfortunate “white orbs” problem which pretty much brought that model to a sudden halt. Apart from that I found the Fuji approach to exposure and image control not just idiosyncratic but frustrating and irritating so I did not buy either the X20 nor X30 follow-up models.

In the event Fuji dropped almost all of their compact and bridge camera catalogue in favour of ILCs and the XT series.

However I think that in the X30 they had a camera which almost got it right. It was not ultra tiny. This meant you could get a proper hold on it and there was space for proper controls. The lens had a manual zoom, there was a decent EVF in the right place and the whole thing was designed for enthusiast operation.

A modern iteration of the X30 could include the guts of the X-A5 with a Bayer type 28mm sensor, standard mode dial and control dial interface and a fixed, collapsing lens and built in EVF.  I guess Fuji’s response to this proposal might be to say “get the X-A5 then” but that is not quite what I am on about.

In 2014 I bought a Nikon Coolpix P7800. This was a substantial, high spec, fully featured compact with “all the fruit” as they say in the motor trade. It had a built in EVF, articulated monitor, excellent 28-200mm (equivalent) lens and a full set of controls. It was designed to compete with Canon’s G series compacts of the day. It would have done too, but for one problem.  To continue the motoring analogy it was a sports car with a lawnmower engine.

The processor was woefully inadequate. The camera needed a 3 second rest after each RAW shot before it would condescend to make another picture. I remember at the time thinking I could do better in 1964 with my old, all manual Pentax Spotmatic SLR.

I have over the years bought, used and gotten frustrated by a long string of Lumix compacts.

Unlike the Nikon all the Panasonics have had fast processors and snappy performance. The problems have mainly related to lens and sensor capability.

In 2007 I bought an LX2 which featured the unusual 16:9 aspect ratio sensor. It had been released in 2006, along with the even more ambitious, idiosyncratic L1.

I have to say the LX2 was a failure for me. I found it difficult to get decent pictures out of that camera. In addition the performance was, as I recall, slow with long shot to shot times.

The LX5 in 2010 was a better camera all round with a good lens and good picture quality. But the controls were awkward, particularly the rear dial and there was no EVF. It did not stay long in my camera drawer.

Panasonic more or less invented the travel zoom category and over the years produced many of cameras of this type.

Unfortunately they also adopted the practice of giving each model a different name in each market region to the confusion of all and sundry.

I had a string of TZ models (a.k.a. ZS but with a different number, go figure), probably the TZ60, 70 80 and 90. They all had the same tiny 7.6mm diagonal sensor, compact size, 30x zoom, built in EVF, good handling and snappy, responsive  performance. Their downfall for me was a combination of a very noisy sensor behind a lens of variable and inconsistent sharpness, reasonably but unpredictably good in one focal length range but not others. In addition their stabiliser was not very effective.

Then came a series of compacts using the 15.9mm diagonal sensor. Cameras which use this (Sony) sensor are capable of much better image quality than those using the smaller 7.6mm type.

The TZ110 was slippery with no proper handle. I could fix this with an aftermarket stick-on handle but a much worse problem was the lens which was inconsistently unsharp at different focal lengths and apertures. I actually bought two copies of this camera thinking one might be faulty but they were both the same. The lens also had the weird characteristic that at some focal lengths it would get less sharp with nasty looking ni-sen effect when the aperture was closed about 1/3 -2/3 stop. I never saw this reported by any reviewer.

The same problem appeared in the LX10/15. The lens on this camera was sharp wide open at some focal lengths but not at others and it inconsistently developed double imaging when slightly stopped down. Again I saw no report of this in any review which makes me wonder just how much hands on time some reviewers actually have with their products.

There was no EVF and the rear screen was not up to bright sunlight. Overall I have to rate my copy of the LX10/15 as one of the least satisfactory cameras I have ever owned.

The LX100 was released with great fanfare in 2014. This promised to be the enthusiast’s compact with Leica style hard controls for aperture, shutter speed and exposure compensation.

Indeed there was a lot to like about this camera and on paper it looked like the answer to all my compact requirements.

But there were two problems.

First,  the autofocus system was very prone to misfocussing when presented with a subject having many specular light sources. In my part of the world this is usually provided by sunlight reflecting off the leaves of trees. Other AF inconsistencies were reported on user forums.

Second was inconsistent lens sharpness. By that I mean that one copy would be unsharp at the edges at the long end, another copy would be unsharp on one side at some intermediate focal length.

I actually had at different times two copies of the LX100 (original) one copy of the LX100.2 and one copy of that camera’s leica equivalent the D-Lux 7.

I kept hoping to find one that had both a decent lens and a reliable AF system.

But it was not to be. The one with the best lens had the worst AF issue and vice versa.

So I gave up and looked elsewhere.

 Since the original film version in 1996, Ricoh GR compacts have a acquired a cult-like status among street and social photographers. They  feature a 28mm (equivalent) lens, compact size, very good image quality and good handling. None of the digital models has an EVF or a built in OVF.

I bought a GR2 just before the GR3 arrived. I found this camera quite enjoyable to use indoors, less so outdoors due to the lack of a viewfinder. It had an excellent lens, was reasonably responsive  and made very good pictures. I sold it when the GR3 arrived.

The GR3 is a more highly specified model with a new sensor, more pixels, IBIS, new super sharp lens and a touch screen.

But there are some niggling problems in GR paradise.  Although the GR3 uses more power than the GR2 because there are more pixels and IBIS, it actually has a smaller battery. So carrying one or two spare batteries becomes a requirement rather than an option.

Another is that although the monitor screen has acquired touch capability the panel is not quite as easy to read in sunlight (at  default brightness) as the one on the GR2. Brightness can be boosted 1 or 2 stops but that drains the battery even faster.

Hmmmmm……………..

In 2012 Sony shocked the camera world with the RX100 (original). This pocketable compact promised to deliver image quality equivalent to that of a mid range DSLR and it really did just that.  Since then we have seen v2, v3, v4, v5, v5A and v6 iterations of this ground-breaking model, each using some version of the Sony 15.9mm (a.k.a. one inch) sensor.  

Camera historians looking for the point in time which marked the beginning of Sony’s ascendancy over Canon and Nikon might well select the arrival of the RX100 as that point.

With the RX100 Sony demonstrated its technological superiority over all other camera makers.

A family member bought a RX100 (original) and used it for several years making excellent pictures along the way.

I eventually succumbed to the lure of Sony technology and bought a RX100.4.

The specifications and picture quality of this little camera were every bit as good as claimed. It really did offer big camera picture quality in a tiny pocketable form.

But I never warmed to the RX100.4. It never became the camera I wanted to take out with me 

because I liked using it. It was so small it was awkward to hold even with the obligatory accessory handle. The controls were all small and not particularly easy to operate. The pop-up-pull-out-push-back-push-down  EVF was a nuisance and lacked an eyecup. My copy sometimes mis-focussed for no reason I could  discover.

I subsequently discovered that the RX100.4 was a typical Sony, loaded to the brim with technological wizardry but not particularly engaging or enjoyable to use.

I now wonder if the advanced pocketable camera has a future at all.

If  I want a device which

* Is pocketable

* Can take good pictures

* Can easily store and share those pictures

I will choose a smartphone. And as a bonus the device can make phone calls, email and connect to the internet.

If I may be so bold as to offer advice to Sony’s product development people it would be to re-work their user interface in all its aspects from the ground up, including a root-and-branch review of the menus and a complete rethink of the physical interface including body and handle shapes and all controls. They can find out what to do by reading this blog.

If Sony can successfully navigate this process they will become the top camera company. Sony might achieve this anyway given the poor competition offered by Canon right now.

(at the time of writing it appears Sony has overtaken Nikon for second spot).

There remains one compact in my camera drawer,  the Ricoh GR3 and that is on probation.

I have of late been exploring options for the concept of interchangeable-lens-camera-as-compact.

There are two basic reasons for this:

First: I don’t really much care for any of the compacts on the market at the present time.

Second: I suspect that the compact camera as a photographic genre is probably headed nowhere.

The all-pervading influence of smartphones on this issue is obvious of course but within the camera world I think that Sony started this ILC-as-compact trend even as the company was rolling out its RX100 series.

In their review of the all new NEX-3  camera with 28mm diagonal (APS-C) sensor and new E Mount in 2010 the Digital Photography Review editors wrote: