I used to carry my SLR and laptop with me in my huge backpack every day, but a few changes have resulted in almost never bringing my camera day-to-day anymore
(…)
But today, Nora tipped me off to the relatively new Canon S90.
Let’s see: small size, great image quality, RAW shooting, manual controls, not too expensive.
We may have a winner.
I’ve essentially given up on small point’n’shoot cameras. The iPhone is good enough for snaps which just need to capture enough info to carry a joke, but it basically makes only one kind of pretty shot - the overprocessed, grungy polaroid.
For anything else, you need a “real” camera. All point’n’shoots are better than the iPhone, but for my taste, they’re not good enough. Oh, they have manual controls and decent optics, but they won’t do this.
In my experience, you don’t need a particularly fancy DSLR. My D40 works great. The real gain you get by going SLR is the ability to hook up some fabulous gear. No point’n’shoot had a badass lens like the Nikon 50mm f/1.8D. I’m not an accessory hoarder, and I’m not saying you need to buy more stuff for your stuff, but a good lens and a good flash change the game completely when it comes to photography. And a lens will last you years (decades?) since you should be able to keep using it as you upgrade the camera body to fancier new models.
Today’s photo dilemma reminds me of the “oldest+newest” strategy some music nerds take: they listen to music on vinyl and on the iPod. The iPod is the super-convenient, good-enough option; the vinyl is the clean, warm, uncompressed medium. Following this analogy, point’n’shoots are basically CDs: better sounding than the iPod (in most cases) but not as good (or “cool”) as vinyl; hopelessly stuck between convenience and quality.
Sometimes products like CDs and point’n’shoot cameras find a golden middle; other times, the compromise simply makes them less than fully assed.
