We see a lot of cameras here at ThinkCamera - there have been something like 20 announced this week and our review cupboard is pretty well groaning at the seams. Every manufacturer likes to tell you they have unique features and it's true they all have different things to offer. However, certain trends are becoming apparent - it's clear that some things are very hot at the moment. This article looks at them, tells you what you need to know and which you can live without.
Image stabilisation
This is a very hot area in camera technology at the moment and we are seeing it on more and more compact digital cameras. It goes by various names (Image Stabilisation, Vibration Reduction, Mega OIS, Steady shot etc) and works in various ways but the aim is always the same - to hold the camera steady when the photographer shakes.
A rule of thumb is that most people with good technique can hold a camera steady at about the effective focal length of the lens in fractions of a second, i.e. you could hold a 300mm lens still at 1/300s and a 50mm lens still at 1/50s. Most compacts have a lens that goes to either about 100 or 200mm. Some of the new super zooms go up to about 300mm and this is where image stabilisation comes into play. There are 3 ways to reduce apparent camera shake:
- Software. Many compact digicams use advanced deblurring routines to make the picture look sharper.
- Sensor shake. The camera detects the motion caused by the photographer shaking and moves the sensor to combat it. This is the system used by Sony in the A100 and by Panasonic it its OIS system. This works better than software since the picture really is sharper rather than being made to look sharper by a program.
- Lens stabilisation. This is only available on cameras with interchangeable lenses. It uses gyroscopes and moving lens elements to stabilise the image. The image in the viewfinder looks steadier but lens stabilisation is relatively expensive and needs to be in every lens you want stabilised.
All of these techniques aim to improve picture sharpness at slow shutter speeds meaning that you can use longer lenses in darker conditions and still get great results.
Noise reduction
Noise has always been a problem in digital cameras. When you start to use higher ISO settings you start to get random speckles of coloured pixels. These show up primarily in the dark areas and are particularly bad if the shot has been underexposed. On most cameras they are unnoticeable at 100ISO and below on a well exposed shot. As the ISO climbs the noise gets worse and worse although some cameras are noticeably better at noise suppression than others.
Twelve months ago, it was relatively rare to find a compact camera that went over 400 ISO - now we are seeing some of the more expensive compacts boasting 1,000, 1,200 and even 1,600 ISO. This allows them to take pictures in darker and darker environments. With a small sensor and 1,600 ISO noise is inevitable but manufacturers are tackling it by building noise reduction software into the cameras. This works by “intelligently” smoothing and slightly blurring parts of the images. Sometimes it works and the results are fantastic and sometimes it makes all your pictures look blurry.
In-camera editing
This is kind of a weird one but it's gaining ground. Lots of manufacturers are now putting editing facilities into their cameras. You can take a shot, crop it, correct the red eye, frame it and hook it up to a PictBridge printer. Perfectly edited shots without going anywhere near a computer.
The facilities available range from the comic (fun picture frames), through mildly useful (cropping and black and white conversion) to the truly useful (after the shot red eye correction). More and more of these are being put into cameras but somehow I just can't see them being used that much. Sure, it's great to be able to remove red eye and create a cyanotype tint within the camera - but are you really going to? Are you going to do that more than once?
Maybe these will evolve into something so great that people will use them a lot but at the moment I see them as just filling up feature lists.
Cross over functions
Pretty well all mobile phones now have cameras in them and we are starting to see cameras adding “cross over” functions too.
Most compact camera have a movie mode with sound recording and some have taken this to the next level and have a movie mode without pictures. Yep, it's just a small shift of concept and an extra menu option to put a voice recorder in compacts. Samsung's NV3 takes this further and adds an MP3 player to the camera and there are even a couple of cameras that allow you to play games on them. Whether any of these stops being a nice add on and actually becomes a reason for buying a particular camera remains to be seen - but it's only a matter of time until we see a camera with a built in phone.
| 
