Oh man, this guy totally read my mind. I shoot with a Rebel XSi so I don’t have to deal with this stuff on a regular basis, but point and shoots are full of useless and/or legacy features that really ought to go. This list over at Photography Bay gets it right, and I’ve got a couple of my own.
- Digital Zoom
- Too many pixels
- High ISO
- Smile shutter
- Simulated shutter noise
Essentially just clicking the magnifying glass on the image you’re looking at, this has always been bad and should never have been implemented in the first place.
Cramming ten or more megapixels onto a tiny, tiny sensor is asking for general image quality weirdness, and more megapixels to see the bad glass in.
This goes for DSLRs too. ISO above 10,000? Give me a break, noise is already out of control at 1600. Work on effective noise reduction or dynamic pixel binning, don’t just push the gain.
I haven’t had occasion to work with this, but not being able to pick the exact moment I take a shot would be unbearable for me. The tech is cool, but meh.
If you’re not using a flash, I actually don’t mind a little noise to let your subject know when they can relax, or let you know the instant the picture is taken. Unfortunately, I hear shutter noises that are maybe a second long. Not helpful.
And can we add:
- In-camera “effects”
- A million “modes”
- Ostensibly helpful custom software
White balance and color space are one thing, but sepiatone, brush stroke, etc are completely ridiculous and look terrible. If you really must do that, do it in iPhoto or something.
Let’s be honest. Unless it’s on manual, the thing is on full auto all the time. Setting it to “portrait” or “outdoors” or what have you is just limiting its parameters, and probably mistakenly.
I’m happy to install a driver or plug-in for the camera so it gets recognized easily. But I’m not going to install your weak-ass image editor when there are free and versatile ones available freely or included with my OS.
Anyone else have some pet peeves they’d like excised from your otherwise-great point and shoots?
Thanks Devin.
I have a feeling that we aren’t the only ones with these pet peeves.
Yes, please. Anyone know of a camera that does (or more appropriately, does not do) these things? Time to search Ebay?
Well, a film camera :)
Buddy, you gotta try this camera I picked up at the pharmacy the other day. It was only $12.99, wrapped in cardboard, has a flash and takes up to 24 shots, and get this – you can just throw it away when you’ve got your pictures! Its the future I tells ya.
Im fine with displaying digital zoom.
But why in gods name does it actually shoot at that.
The way I see it, we should use digital zoom to more accurately center whatever it is we are shooting at.
But it should actually take the frame at what ever the last optical zoom was.
Otherwise digital zoom is worthless.
interesting. I have a really good sense of symmetry and alignment (obsessive, really), but I can see what you’re getting at.
Good points.
Why spend all that effort with “Smile Detect”? Why not spend the cash on improving Shutter Delay so you can use the eye balls and fingers God gave us.
How many half decent pictures have you seen irretrievably ruined by sticking them into B&W.
How about adding an alert function while you have the flash on that says “Move back now, or you’ll make them look like red-eyed anaemic zombies”.
@andrewkfromaz Try a Superzoom if you don’t want the gadgets and do want better lens glass. My other big tip is to look at good photos and learn how to take good photos.
Ha ha! These are all spot on. It’d be great if the compact camera market was just a little more honest about what they can do and designed them so that they took good photos in situations other than the only one they seem designed around, judging from the advertising – people standing 1-2 m from the camera, with the flash on. This is also the where they have as much control over as they can (so maybe there’s a reason for that) – there’s enough light to not make the photo really noisy and it’s easy to focus in a short time. In any other situation they often really struggle, taking ages to focus and then coming up with a photo that’s flat and often noisy.
I guess a lot is down to the often tiny lenses, which let in very little light, but even the larger-lensed ones seem to have trouble taking a photo that looks as good as a DSLR one.
I’d love to see a camera that was both compact but that could take great photographs – it doesn’t need to be monster-resolution, it just has to be good quality and not have that flat, everything in focus, snap-type look. It was possible in the days of film; it’d be a shame to think that we can’t do it now.
Oh, and thought the smile shutter sounds like a silly thing, it might be a real need for some of these cameras, due to the indeterminable amount of time between you pressing the shutter button and it actually taking the photo. Throw the focussing time into the mix and it can sometimes take over 1-2 seconds to take the photo. So while you can capture an instant with a DSLR, it’s often gone by the time you press the button on a compact camera. Maybe it’s best to leave it on autopilot.
I’d like to see a new camera that takes a photo the way I intended, not the way actually took it.
Either that, or a radical new 3-4MP camera with a flash (on/off), auto & manual mode, and a handy delete button. That’s it. No movies, sound, filtering options etc etc etc.