Our digital camera expert, Chris Coleman, discusses the ultrazoom digital cameras we've seen recently. What's the best ones around and who would benefit from such a long lens?
Best ultrazoom digital cameras
Who would benefit from an ultrazoom digital camera?
The age of the ultrazoom digital camera is upon us and, as with megapixel counts, the market has been drawn into an arms race over who offers the most awesome level of zoom. Before we all drown in the furor and start pining for a 300x 'überzoom' camera, let's take a step back and think about who stands to benefit from such extreme zoomage and who doesn't.
There's certainly a bargain factor to the ultrazoom niche. After all, a cheap telephoto lens costs more than a few of these cameras combined, and that's without including the cost of the actual SLR body. Still, it's not a free lunch: because of the optical demands of a high focal-length lens, ultrazooms simply aren't as sharp as a standard compact with a good lens. Ultimately, it's a trade-off between overall image-quality and the simple ability to use your camera as a telescope. When might that be worth it?
Graduation, concerts and sports
Outside the professional realm, this is probably the most useful application for ultrazoom digital cameras. At a graduation ceremony, the 20x zoom of the Olympus SP-570UZ is the difference between having a general shot of the entire assembly and having a close-up of your kid as he or she picks up their diploma. At a football game, you could have shots of individual players on the field, even if you're stuck in the nose bleeds. Instead of having another of those dull, bleary concert photos that pervade MySpace, you could have a full-on portrait of the singer. In these cases image quality is essentially irrelevant. The photos are documents of an event, and the mere ability to take them at all is useful.
Nature
Everybody takes pictures of trees, but with a Nikon P80 you could take pictures of the tiny bird nestled in the top foliage. There's all sorts of weirdness and intrigue in nature, and most of the time you can't get anywhere near it; with an ultrazoom, you can at least zoom into it. This isn't quite as useful as taking far away stadium shots, as image quality is a concern here. When you're trying to capture, say, the beauty of a bird's feathers, it doesn't help when the photograph itself is blurry and lacks edge detail. Regardless, once again it falls down to basic ability. Being able to take a so-so picture is categorically better than not being able to take the picture at all.
Spy photography
No, seriously. The elephant in the room with an ultrazoom digital camera is that it's basically a telescope with a camera already attached and, unlike a serious SLR with a mondo-telephoto lens, it doesn't take an entire backpack to carry it around. Illicit or not, the combination of telescopic zoom, compact size and silent operation all but screams 'covert activity.' Welcome to the brave new world.
Who doesn't need it
As with megapixel ratings, the best advice is simple: if you don't specifically need telephoto capabilities, don't get fooled into buying one camera over another simply because, for instance, the 18x Panasonic DMC-FZ18 is more than the 5x Fujifilm Finepix f100fd. If you buy an ultrazoom digital camera and never use its ultrazoom, you're wasting money on a narrowly useful feature, and all of your pictures are going to look a little bit worse to boot. There is certainly an element of "just in case," and personally there have been plenty of times when we desperately wished we had more zooming power on hand. Then again, there have also been plenty of times when we desperately wished we had an infra-red filter, or a large-format film camera, or access to an imbibition processing lab. Life goes on. Better not to get caught up in spec-baiting, and simply buy the camera you need for the pictures you want to take.
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