Praise for pocket digital cameras

My first leap into digital photography involved pocket digitals. They included one of the oyster shell Olympus cameras, a Nikon L1 & a Nikon L12. All three cameras took great photos. The basics of photography, focus, composition & light still applied. You still can't put a bride in a white wedding gown in front of a dark background and expect to get beautiful photos without compensation.

As resolution in pocket cameras climbed to 10 megapixels & beyond some asked why purchase a digital slr? The versatility of the slr allows more control, depth of field preview, a wide variety of lenses and filters and physical stability for the ultrasharp & crisp photos we all want. For indoor photography the digital slr allows for off camera lighting from hotshoe flashes to professional units.

Although possible, I've never seen a professional wedding photographer using only a pocket digital so if you have asperations of shooting as a semi-pro or professional photographer the digital slr is your best choice.

Pocket digitals allow the casual to the serious amateur photographer a way to capture beautiful images, have the advantage of ulta-portability and ease of use without investing a lot of money. If you choose to step up to an slr your possibilities expand greatly.

Keep shooting & most of all have fun out there.

Some of these P&S are really good these days, and I love how compact they have become

I still love my little P&S although it is rather old now

The DSLR offers me more versatility but my P&S I can just slip into my pocket and use whenever I get the opportunity. I must admit I normally use it just to capture the moment and use my DSLR when I want to take 'proper' photo's

Agree some of the shots taken with these tiny cameras leave nothing to be desired. I have a Pentax Optio SV, tiny but sound. Unfortunately it is rather too small for me to manage anymore so I have recently acquired a Coolpix P80, not what one would call small but very light and with large enough controls for me to manage. Even with the lens of the P80 I still find the need to revert to my DSLR quite often and as much as I love the P80 I would not wish to be without the dslr.

I love my little panasonic or dog walking cam
It fits in my jeans pocket, and I am not stressing that the kids or the dogs are going to smash into my camera, when we are out and about

It does take quite good shots, and is perfect for snaps

I love my sony, I still use it often and its responsable for my fave ever picture

I started off with pocket digitals, well thats all there was in the form of digital of course, back in the day. SLR film users were still giggling at digital uers, always announcing 'it will never be better than film (35mm)' Ha! wot a bunch of ignorant fools.

Anyway, now I use (D)SLRs I could never go back to a compact, they are fiddly, lack intuitive controls, and nowadays you can hardly find one with a viewfinder, and taking pictures at arms length, omg never

The biggest issue I see with P&S is Mpixel count. What on earth are these people going to do with high Mpixel rates? I mean, can you imagine 15Mpixels shot through a cheap plastic lens? whats the point? The CCDs (or CMOS soon?) will just pick up all the distortions and imperfections in the lens, then what? Pack in more software to clean it up?

Not for me I am afraid

Alan.

wildwalker that was a bit harsh some of the pics on here are taken with compacts and they are excellent.

I shot my first wedding for a friend with my fuji s5000 and they were well good.

maybe you just need more skill with a compact and thats why its not for you.

As soon as I bought an slr my pics became instantly better and that must be something to do with the camera?

Wikdtalker do you find these pocket digital images all that bad?

Bobmielke - that third photo is stunning!