The future of COMPACT cameras!!

[EOS Man]

I remember the good ol' days where a S500 IXUS/ELPH could fire away at 2.4 FPS with DIGIC I and take a good 20+ string of 5 MP photos in a burst.

On the generation of DIGIC II cameras in 2005/6 the cameras did 7MP at 2 FPS until the memory card filled up. Not that bad, a sacrifice of .4 FPS for 2 more MP.

Now, what I'm seeing are a bunch of sluggish 1.2-1.5 FPS compacts from Canon. These are 8 MP or 12 MP IXUS/ELPH cameras which have DIGIC III (which I'm sure has at least 3X the speed/throughput of DIGIC I) but are firing at ~1.3 FPS :evil:. And it's not like these cameras have to do RAW, AI Servo or continuous AF tracking or anything. What's up with that?

No, none of the shooting conditions have changed. Unless you consider CF Ultra II switch to SD Ultra II as one of the changes (and I heard SD is faster than CF??)

In my opinion, it's pointless for a manufacturer to market me any compact camera which CANNOT do at least a 2 FPS burst and/or a minimum of 10 shots a burst at full resolution.

In fact, it ain't only Canon. Panasonic's FX100 looks like it fits the bill... 12 MP at 2 FPS.... until you see the max burst of 5! P.S. I hate the marketing bull from the likes of Casio, Olympus and other craphead companies who advertise their cameras as '7 FPS*' and then a tiny asterick saying 7FPS at 1MP.

Once I was carrying my 30D with 24-70 with its huge can-swallow-your-ultrazoom-camera-sized hood and along comes this salesguy at the mall who comes up to me with 'check out our latest Casio camera, it has 7 MP and does 7 shots/sec' (forgot what that thingy with huge zoom using an internal lens is called). I gave him this 'Do you really expect me to believe that?' look .

I guess I had better just stick with my dSLR and start saving for a 1D Mark III N which can do 10 MP at 12 FPS up to its 300 RAW frames buffer (hey, this is the camera rumors forum isn't it?) :p

The $2,300 question (can buy you a 5D :lol:) is:
Is Canon serving us a watered down/fake DIGIC III in compact cameras? (probably paranoid that their IXUS cameras may start posing a threat to the sales of their EOS 1Ds Mark III)

[sm1rf]

Interesting viewpoint, i stopped looking at specs for compacts after i bought my 350. But if the specs you quote are right, and i don't doubt they are, it is food for thought.

[SunTsu]

Yes, interesting points. One thing I've thought about is how they market their point and shoots. For example, my SD900 has 10MP and the Mark III I am thinking about buying also has 10MP, but costs....10 times more. I know they are completely different animals, but one still has to wonder what goes on in their heads. One guess is that their EOS division is completely different from their Elph division. I'm almost certain that they have different product managers, etc and they may not even have any collaboration at all. As such, I wonder if it's possible that the EOS guys just work with the Digic guys more and know how to get into the hooks of the chip better than the Elph guys.

I come from the world of electronics manufacturing so those are just some of my thoughts from what I've experienced.

[wernersl]

how does an sd900 and a mk III end up in the same sentence? 10mp on a sensor the size of a sperm or 10mp on a 27mm sized sensor. not to mention that i can use the mk III as a back-up bowling ball in a pinch! of course the eos and elph lines are different animals. the elph cameras are great for someone who just wants to push a button and go. the 10mp they advertise is strictly market hype. i would rather they start REDUCING resolution on the tiny sensors and concentrate more on the processing and feature set, but who am i to tell them what to do? its not whats going on in their heads...its the general public confused with the mp phalicy and canon responding to stay in the race. my $.02

[RedHot]

And how much did you pay for that old s500? probably at least twice the price of Canon's current offerings. Prices have come down due to competition so something had to give - and part of that is image recording speed, lens appeture, build construction.

Even though current camerashave digic3 that doesn't mean it should be able to throughput 12MP images at the same speed as 5MP images especially when they all need NR applied to such a large image.

Canon's goal should be to keep the images with the same level if quality as they pack mor and more pixels in (which I think anything over 6MP is too much). Canon has been quite clear: if you want the best performance and image quality get one of their dSLRs.

You get what you pay for. If you want increasing performance and image size you should expect to pay more over time from new model to new model not less prices are so cheap on new P&S cameras that not much quality or performance can really be put into them.