Ed. Note: I dropped over by the greenbelt entrance on spyglass and made a few pictures with the crappy new camera I talk about below.
My main camera has started getting about 20 pictures on a set of batteries, and unless I can figure out what’s going wrong or fix it myself, is not likely to get fixed. The economics just don’t really warrant it–it’s a $300 camera, and it seems unlikely it’d get fixed for less than $200. Even if it’s less than that, I’m kind of reluctant to dump more money in a camera that lately seems more and more limited. Maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to buy a new camera.
In any case, I managed to convince myself that I needed a backup camera, in case I, say for instance, went on vacation and found out my “real” camera was not working correctly. So, I went down and got myself a teeny little Sony DSC-S600, Which is a very small, very basic 6MP camera. I picked it up for $230, including tax and a 2-year warranty from Fry’s.
I’m pretty torn about this camera. The voice of frugality tells me to take the camera back and keep the money, because it doesn’t do many of the things that I want. However, anybody know knows me knows that that voice of frugality is usually muffled by the door of the small closet I keep it in when I’m not beating it fists full of $10 quarter rolls.
The problem is that it does do a lot of stuff. It does more stuff than the Canon PowerShot A20 I used before I got my E-10. Technically speaking, it’s even got some features my E-10 doesn’t have, like continuous 5-zone autofocus and more-zoned evaluative metering. Plus it’s got more pixels. It’s even got a movie-recording mode that doesn’t look half-bad when set to the highest quality.
On top of that, it’s very compact and lightweight. My E-10 weighs two pounds and change. The DSC-S600 weighs “and change”–6.4 ounces, with batteries. It’s small enough to fit in a pocket, whereas the E-10 is small enough to fit in a trunk, and most backpacks.
Of course, that’s not the whole story. The big story is the stuff that’s missing. No aperature- ot shutter-priority mode. As a matter of fact, no exposure control at all beyond a +/- EV setting. That’s no great problem, although it is a problem. The great problem is that there’s no manual focus. I’ve shot days with my E-10 where I rarely futzed with the exposure–most of my time in big bend was spent in completely-automatic Program mode–but I didn’t realize how much I use manual focus. More accurately, I used the super-sharp DSLR focusing screen to tell what’s in focus, even when I wasn’t focusing manually. It makes a huge difference. it is very difficult to tell, with this new camera, what exactly it is that you’re taking a picture of.
Another thing is the resolution. Sure, it’s got 2 million pixels more than the E-10, but that isn’t a huge gain on its face (2240 horizontal pixels to 2816, an extra 25% in horizontal resolution). Moreover, the teeny lens and relatively small amount of light admitted by it combine to make the individual pixels on the S600 considerably noisier and less sharp than on the E-10. I’d definitely go so far as to say that the E-10 produces sharper pictures, even at the lower megapixel count. I should have known that big huge honking lens was good for something.
Almost as important, there’s no lens thread to mount filters and such on the S600. This isn’t a big deal, except for the polarizer. If you don’t think a polarizer is a big deal, check out this image, with no polarizer:
…and this image, with:
Luckily, I can jury-rig a solution by holding my 62MM polarizer in front of the lens. Primitive, but it works.
So the camera sucks compared to a much more sophisticated camera that still sells for half again as much, even after six years. No surprise there. It’s not supposed to replace the E-10, but provide something for me to limp along with until next month, when I can work a little more overtime and replace it with a Canon EOS-300D or EOS-10D. Or maybe, if I’m feeling rich, Canon EOS-350D or even a EOS-20D. They’re coming out with the 30D now, that’s gotta drive prices on the 20D down…
