jumii - Recent messages

According to this test it looks ok compared to the competition: http://www.cnet.com.au/olympus-sz-31mr-339342896.htm#image1

Although as I see it only has a 1/2.3" sensor.

Personally I'm not a fan of these extreme zooms. My view is that the more you zoom the more the image shakes, which doesn't matter if shooting with a tripod, but if shooting handheld then such zoom is only conditionally usable, plus the aperture closes a lot. In other words 24x zoom on a compact without tripod only works when the sun is shining
Also with big zoom you often have limitations in the atmosphere itself because it's often hazy etc. And people often buy big zooms and then zoom instead of taking a few steps closer to the subject. Pictures (portraits) are much more natural if shot at focal length around 50mm - such perspective as you'd actually see with your own eye.

Just food for thought. If you're photographing eagles on a tree on the neighboring hill on sunny days, 24x zoom will definitely come in handy.

@Daam even the small Canon s100/110 has a sensor of that size 1/1.7".

Anyway, check dpreview.com, especially those products that got gold or silver award. Even if the review is a year or two old it's fine. No difference in image quality. Better look at user feedback, because manufacturers in eternal battle to make products cheaper get stingy and make features instead of responsiveness and usability. And then under pressure "buy the newest" you end up with 3 mp more, 1 cm bigger screen and slower camera :/. The only new feature I'd personally want is WiFi image transfer.

Even if you go check in some big bang, put in a card, do burst of 5 shots, and you'll see right away how it responds. Say black screen for 3 seconds between shots... I wouldn't buy such photos.

My advice would be, don't look at megapixels and how many times zoom it has, and what features it has, but go to dpreview.com and read the review and look at the pictures - especially those taken at higher ISO! Also look at sensor size. Go test the camera at big bang if they have it, to see if it's responsive and fast.

A colleague bought an Olympus that has oh and all features (around 10x optical zoom, GPS,...). In practice though, the GPS takes so long to initialize that it's actually useless on a point and shoot camera, saving to card is extremely slow. Actually you'd be faster with a classic wind-up camera than this (even if the card is slow - the camera must have buffer for at least a few shots). Not to mention I couldn't copy pictures from colleague's camera because it has non-standard USB connector!?! In short, when using this camera, I had the feeling Olympus put all effort into making as many marketing features as possible.

So once again, read reviews before buying. Another story, colleague bought new Sony compact with 14m-pix for about 250eur, and concluded it doesn't work any faster than 10 year old Canon s45, 14mpix is marketing 14, real is about 8 or max 10, in low light it makes equally crappy pictures as the old Canon - only noise reduction algorithms for night shots are better.

I have EOS 400D, takes super pics, but too heavy/too big for mountains and looking for smaller.

Very likely I'll buy this:
http://www.dpreview.com/previews/canon-powershot-s110
Mainly for 2 reasons:
1.) Size
2.) 1/2,3" CMOS sensor -> Less noise than competition in low light

If money no issue, then mini EOS-M (mini SLR):
http://www.dpreview.com/previews/canon-eos-m