I’ve just bought a new camera. I have always eschewed the compact camera, preferring the sophistication of the SLR. As time has gone on, lugging the necessary equipment around meant that I often left it behind. The arrival of the camera phone means that I’ve not picked up the SLR for a few years now. However, the lack of quality means that I bought a bridge camera. I noticed while on the Isle of Man, that even this was more than I really wanted to carry about, so I have finally succumbed and bought a Lumix DMC-LX15, which is about the size of my wallet, can sit in my pocket or the tank bag of the bike, is as portable as the mobile phone but with a better lens and higher quality images.
So, despite my tendency to not give feedback, on this occasion, I’m giving it the thumbs up. At £429, it’s not hideously expensive, is easy to carry about and will probably revitalise my interest in photography. It’s early days, but I’m impressed.
A lovely camera, I use it mostly for video when I go to music gigs. Video fom it was good enough fo Icelandic TV
I made a similar journey some years ago…
I had a Sony Alpha and a bag of lenses. I wanted a longer lens but a decent zoom was incredibly expensive.
During my search for the lens I stumbled across bridge cameras and ended up with a Lumix DMC-FZ300 which has the most amazing 25-600 zoom lens built-in.
I sold the Sony and have never regretted the ‘upgrade’ or noticed any issue with image quality.
I’ve had a credit sized camera for a long time now. 2MP and more than enough for my needs.
So compact that when my granddaughter went away on a school trip she took it and when it came back it had been crushed to half its size because a truck had ran over it. How? I never got to the bottom of that. I bought the same model second hand on eBay for 10% of the prices because everything was 8MP by then. Still using it now.
You might be impressed but it doesn’t look as if your cat is. We have two cats, one is a grumpy old cat, one is a younger and much happier cat.
He always looks like that. He’s a happy chap really.
There are/were two forms of compact camera: those with physically small sensors and those with larger sensors. The advantage of the larger sensor is better image quality at low light levels but the disadvantage is a limited zoom range.
The DMC-LX15 only has a range of 24-70mm (35mm equivalent) which is a bit short for me; I would have thought, having taken a lot of photographs of car road rallies, that it was too short for the Isle of Man TT.
The DMC-LX15 has been around for a surprisingly long time, since 2016, so a bit of a niche market segment it appears.
I’ve still got the bridge camera. Most of my photography isn’t the kind that requires a long lens anyway. The TT is a bit of an exception.