We’re in a bit of a photography golden age, with the declining cost and instant gratification of digital cameras having spawned a renewed interest in photography. It’s easy to become confused when the average electronics store has dozens of camera on display, at widely varying price points. Let’s review some of the common camera types, and the pros and cons of each. In order to simplify, I’ve categorized cameras in a bit of an unconventional manner, but hopefully this will simplify rather than convolute the wide range of choices now available.
Camera Phones
Pros:
- Always nearby
- Easy to use
- Fairly high-quality images, on par with pocket cameras of a few years ago
- Easy and immediate photo sharing
Cons:
- Lower quality images, especially in low light or fast action situations
- Poor flash performance
- Limited adjustability
Perhaps you’ve heard of this popular camera phone?
Camera phones are now a viable option as a “real” camera, whereas they were essentially toys producing terrible images just a few short years ago. The primary benefit of a camera phone is its immediacy: you’re capturing first steps or a “magic moment” while someone else is reaching for their fancy “professional” camera. Furthermore, most smartphone cameras allow instant sharing. Moments after taking a pic, you can share it with friends and family, post it to your social networks, or send it to be printed.
Where camera phones struggle is in sub-optimal conditions: tiny flash units create strange low-light pictures, and running or playing children end up blurred and unrecognizable. Despite these drawbacks, a camera phone has become my primary photographic tool when kids are involved, since its simply the most readily available device 90% of the time. With children especially, fiddling with manual settings and lenses often means a missed opportunity, and I’ll take the great photo captured with sub-optimal equipment to the non-existent photo that was missed by a $10,000 camera and lens combination.
Fixed Lens Cameras
Pros:
- Higher quality images than a camera phone, especially in low-light and fast motion settings
- Often provide zoom capabilities
- In higher-end models, allow adjustment of exposure and camera settings
- May offer image stabilization
- Generally provide swappable memory cards, allowing you to continue to take pictures without worrying about running out of memory
Cons:
- Larger than the average camera phone
- Heavier and less compact
- More difficult to share photos
Fixed lens cameras were the vanguard of the digital camera revolution, with compact Canons and Nikons replacing film cameras before high-quality camera phones became the norm. This style of camera still offers several benefits over the average camera phone, with the major penalty being an increase in size.
One of my first digital cameras, well before the reign of the camera phone, the Canon Digital Elph
Consider for a moment that the average camera has an image sensor, the piece of hardware that turns light into a digital image, that’s about the size of a pencil eraser. The average compact fixed lens camera has a sensor dozens of times the size, allowing the camera to capture more light, and generally produce a higher quality image, just as you’d generally find an image on a 50″ TV more enjoyable than a 20″ TV. The larger size of these cameras also offers the opportunity for a larger flash unit, making for better low-light pictures. In short, you trade quality and additional features for a larger unit. There’s simply no getting around a larger lens, sensor, and flash unit producing better pictures, at the price of portability.
A fixed lens camera also provides a vastly superior lens to a camera phone, often allowing optical zoom. While most camera phones have a zoom function, the camera is simply making the existing image larger. While you could take a pizza an pull it apart to make a physically “larger” pizza, you’d distort the pie and lower it’s quality the larger you tried to make it, and at the end of the day, you’d be working with the same amount of pizza. “Digital zoom” works in the same way, simply making the existing image data appear larger at the cost of quality. The optical zoom present in most fixed lens camera uses moving lenses to magnify an image, providing additional data to the camera, rather than simply enlarging the existing data. There is a minor penalty however, in that a fixed lens means you’re stuck with the zoom capabilities of the lens, and must purchase a new camera should you want a different zoom or higher performance lens.
While a small fixed lens camera may not seem too much of a sacrifice in terms of size and weight, I’d strongly reconsider if I already owned a quality camera phone, like that on recent iPhones and Android devices. If you’re an experience photographer, and having children has rekindled an interest in photography, by all means consider a mid or high-end fixed lens camera that can serve double-duty as a camera for the kids, a travel camera, and an occasional artistic outlet. For the average person however, I’d stick with my camera phone until you find yourself exceeding its abilities, in which case I’d strongly consider an interchangeable lens camera before jumping into a fixed lens camera.
Interchangeable Lens Cameras
Pros:
- More flexible and customizable than most other camera types
- Generally offer complete manual control, for total control of your shots
- Large and high-quality image sensors for high image quality
- Different lenses allow for different capabilities depending on what you’re photographing
- Lenses can often be used on other cameras with a similar format, so you can change camera bodies without buying new lenses
Cons:
- High cost for the camera
- High costs for lenses. A mid-range lens often costs as much or more than the camera
- Larger and heavier equipment
- More control means more complixity
My current “weapon of choice” when not using a camera phone. The Olympus OM-D
At a fundamental level, interchangeable lens cameras separate the lens from the image sensor. Where a camera phone or fixed lens camera marries the “eyes” and “brain” of the camera, and interchangeable lens camera would be like allowing a person to swap their eyes for different capabilities. You might don owl eyes for superior night vision, or butterfly eyes to see ultraviolet light.
Similarly, interchangeable lens allow you to carry a lens with superior zoom capabilities, one with great low light performance, and another that adds an interesting visual effect, like a fish eye lens, all while carrying a single camera “brain” (referred to as the body).
The popular DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) camera is based on 35mm film cameras, and was generally rather bulky due to a complex arrangement of mirrors. However, newer formats like the Micro 4:3 Olympus pictured here have allowed for smaller cameras, and smaller, less costly lenses, creating a nice compromise between quality and portability.
In addition to a wide range of lenses to chose from, interchangeable lens cameras tend to offer the highest image quality, the most manual control, and the best low-light and fast motion capabilities. All this comes at the price of complexity, and the world’s best camera and lens combination will do nothing for the person who can’t use them. For pictures of children especially, the camera you can quickly grab and fire off a few pictures will win the day against the camera collecting dust due to complexity.
If you’re thinking of investing in an interchangeable lens camera, the biggest decision is which lens family you want to buy into. I’ll write more about this later, but consider a second hand or lower end camera, and decide if you’re really interested in learning how to use this style of camera, before investing thousands into a lens family you may later abandon.
As I watch her, I realize how little I observe about the world around me. My mind is moving at a thousand miles and hour, and essentially filtering out everything that’s eminently fascinating to a growing infant. While I’m likely walking down a familiar hallway, or driving a route I’ve traversed dozens of times, there are still nuanced changes ranging from seasonal shifts, to different smells, to subtle sounds. Part of why I enjoy my daughter’s development at this point so much is that it reminds me to slow down and observe. While I’ll avoid the extremes my daughter goes to, and skip on chomping on the kitchen table, or licking the refrigerator, there’s something to be said for approaching the world with open eyes and an observant conscious, rather than a mind turned in upon itself.