The fol­lowing rant is inspired by the ending of the ’08 Photographic Marketing Association con­ven­tion down in Vegas, and by all the pho­to­graphic poking around I did with my recent trip photos. It will be a long time before the reviews are in on the new equip­ment from the PMA, but frankly it looks like all the same trends taken one year further. Digital SLRs keep getting better (looks like Canon may have taken back the edge from Nikon in the budget SLR category, but it’s an embar­rass­ment of riches all round). Compact cameras get cranked out faster and cheaper, and with more stupid megapixels. Possible excep­tions: Panasonic is having another go at the TZ line which could be great if they really have cut down the noise, a number of the ridiculous-​​ultra-​​zooms are starting to open up their wide ends (perhaps the cur­va­ture of the earth has begun to limit the value of extending the tele end of these zooms much further) and then there’s this bizarre but endearing beast, which if it actually gets out the door this year will be my first imprac­tical purchase after my Carlos Slim heist comes off. You hear that Sigma? I’m waiting on you. With these and a few other excep­tions, the increas­ingly obvious and boringly old problems with the modern compact camera market are not going away. So on to the rant.

Not to blame my tools, but my old camera sure is getting old. The on/​off slider is so busted up that just touching the front of the camera while it’s turned on turns it off, and I think the lens is going soft, espe­cially around the edges. Frankly, it’s incred­ible that it has survived as long as it has, through as much extreme abuse as it has. It’s a tes­ta­ment to the integrity of the Canon design squad that it works at all. It’s a 6 year old model, which is several life­times in digital camera years. The sad fact is that if I wanted to replace it today, I would an awfully hard time, despite 6 years of new designs. Compact cameras have become huge sellers in the inter­vening years, and are the victim of a pro­por­tion­ally grotesque mar­keting bubble. Certainly, there are lots of new featurey-​​things that have emerged. Some of them are down­right useful (real, physical image sta­bi­liza­tion is a giant step forward in hand-​​held pho­tog­raphy, big old LCD screens are a lovely thing). Most of the new features are useless or near-​​useless, and have just sucked up R&D energy, physical weight and space in camera designs, and consumer’s money. Face recog­ni­tion? Touch-​​screen LCD screens? Fake-​​out “digital image sta­bi­liza­tion” modes?

More than feature-​​creep, the biggest downfall of the compact camera market has been the arms race between megapixels and noise. When I bought my 4 megapixel unit, the pre­vailing wisdom was that 4 megapixels was okay for most uses and 6 megapixels was plenty for anything but truly pro­fes­sional appli­ca­tions. Today the pre­vailing wisdom, if anyone bothers to think about it, is that 4 megapixels is okay for most uses and 6 megapixels is plenty for anything but truly pro­fes­sional appli­ca­tions. Yet compact cameras are rou­tinely jamming 10 or more megapixels onto sensors that are phys­i­cally no bigger than the one in my scratched up silver brick. Because, I guess, people shopping for cameras still respond to “megapixels” as some kind of feature, and it’s one that can be easily inter­preted and com­mu­ni­cated by a salesman or a sign. You know, more “res­o­lu­tion”, whatever that is. On compact cameras, sensors are tiny, typ­i­cally thumb-​​nail size or smaller. Compare that to digital SLRs, which have 10 times or more the sensor area of a compact, and feature roughly the same range of megapixel counts.

The problem is that each pixel on the sensor actually is a physical little object, a sensor in its own right. Sometimes the pixel-​​sensors are called “pho­to­sites” to dis­tin­guish them from “sensors”, in the sense of the the entire sensor chip that sits behind the lens and collects the light to produce the image. If you cram twice as many pho­to­sites onto a sensor, that halves (quarters? my geometry is a bit weak) the size of each pho­to­site. So given the same amount of time that the shutter opens (and shutter speeds aren’t going up, obvi­ously), that means each pho­to­site is going to get struck by half (or a quarter?) as many photons. From those fewer photons the pixel sensor has to decide what it was pointed at.

Camera engi­neers have gotten better at making each pho­to­site a little more sen­si­tive, pulling more info from each photon. But not much better. Not enough to keep up with the fewer and fewer photons each smaller and smaller pho­to­site receives as megapixel counts totter higher and higher. Consequently, new cameras have to over-​​amplify the signal that the sensors record. Imagine turning up the volume on a fuzzy radio station to hear the music better. Sensors nat­u­rally produce some elec­tronic noise, and are somewhat inac­cu­rate in how they record the photons they receive. Amplifying the recorded signal means ampli­fying that noise and inac­cu­racy along with it. So modern compacts have for years been suf­fering from an increasing noise problem. That “grain” in your photos can be artsy-​​artistic some­times, but usually it just mars detail. And that mottled red-​​green-​​blue “colour noise” is just irre­triev­ably lame. Both noise flavours are the direct result of megapixel obses­sion. In terms of raw image quality at least, compact camera sensors are not getting better. They’re getting grad­u­ally worse.

That’s a strange scenario for a category of elec­tronic gadgets, espe­cially one as heavily invested in R&D as digital cameras. Marketing has screwed the cam­er­ap­erson. There are a few excep­tions to the rule. The Canon G7 and G9 come to mind, and of course the Fuji F30 and it’s descen­dants. But notice that even in those camera lines which have a rep­u­ta­tion for low noise, each new model comes with a promise of better image pro­cessing to handle noise, and more megapixels, and a net wash or even loss in the noise department.

Resolution is not pixel count. No matter what the guy at the Best-​​Buy tells you. If your camera has a bijil­lion pixels, but your lens is too soft and smears the image out on them, or if they produce images which are so noisy they have to be smeared by “noise reduc­tion” pro­cessing after the image has been recorded — and despite manufacturer’s claims, there is no noise reduc­tion pro­cessing that doesn’t smear details at least some — or if your pixels were just kind of lame to begin with, then you don’t have a bijil­lion res­o­lu­tion. When I bought my S45, the 6 megapixel S50 replace­ment model had already been out for a while. Long enough that users had estab­lished that the lens on the S45 was sharper, and that the gain in real res­o­lu­tion from the new megapixels in the S50 was lost to the lens quality. So I bought the lower pixel-​​count camera, and never regretted it. Frankly, it’s been a great little camera.

So why didn’t I buy a G9? Well, my other beef with modern cameras is lens angle. For some reason, almost all compacts these days start at a 35mm “wide end”. I’m not sat­is­fied with the 28mm on my S45, I can’t imagine regressing. Of course, they all have longer and longer zooms, but the wide angle is more useful than the tele for most shots (at least it is for me, and I suspect that’s true for the average pho­tog­ra­pher, if they thought about it). But again, 6x vs 3x zoom is an easier number to sell on then “24mm versus 37mm wide angle in 35mm equiv­a­lent viewing angle”. On the plus side, real wide angle actually does seem to be starting to show up in more compacts. On the other hand, my other other beef with modern compacts is raw image format. Back when they designed the S45, it took 4 seconds to nudge a raw image through the internal chips in the camera, a fair chunk of the memory card to store it, and a long time even for your computer to “develop” it once it came off the camera. Now camera chips are smarter/​faster, memory cards are much bigger and com­puters are that much more capable, but raw has almost dis­ap­peared from even “pro-​​sumer” compacts. I’m looking at you, G9. wtf?

So why don’t I buy a digital SLR? Well, porta­bility and the like­li­hood that I’ll actually have it when I want to take a photo, obvi­ously. But I think I might just. Unlike compacts, SLRs have been getting better, faster, lighter, cheaper and more feature-​​crammed every single year. Makes you wonder what they could have done with the compact if they had really tried, doesn’t it?