Have you been considering a change to a digital camera? You’ve seen all the hype, everybody’s doing it and perhaps you are getting the strong message that your old faithful 35mm camera is just "old hat" and nobody who is anybody would be seen dead with that old clunker!" That is how it was with me and my techno-savvy daughters who thought it was time I "got with it". Of course, at SILICON CHIP we have been using a high-end Nikon digital camera for some time now, so I do know the capabilities of digital cameras, or so I thought.

And since I was about to depart on a world trip, I was seriously thinking about getting a compact digital camera to substitute for my old favourite SLR camera which is rather heavy and not one you can "point and shoot".

So I did a quick survey and it quickly came down to a choice between a Fuji Finepix S3500 and an Olympus C725. I wanted something I would be reasonably happy with and that my wife could operate easily without a long and tedious study of an instruction book.

Both cameras look like miniature 35mm SLR cameras but they’re not. They are both reasonably compact and do not have buttons and controls which are so small that a mature (!) male has difficulty using them. And they both have good optical zoom ranges which is important when you’re taking photos as a tourist. In the metal, the Fuji proved to be a lot bulkier than the Olympus although it is probably the better unit. So since I was travelling, I chose the Olympus. Unfortunately, you cannot try them in the store and that is a trap. And I had to buy bigger memory cards because the supplied 16MB is only good for about 20 shots.

So I got it home and put it all together, spent an hour with the instructions and turned it on to take some shots.

First problem is the LCD screen and viewfinder. The LCD screen is fine but try to use it outdoors for picture composition and it becomes very difficult, especially in bright sun when you need to use sunglasses. Alternatively, you try to use the LCD viewfinder but its pixels are so coarse that it is really not possible to tell whether the image is sharply in focus or not. In practice, the viewfinder needs to be optical (most are) rather than LCD.

In fact, focus is a problem, because in the normal automatic mode, it has aperture priority which means that the aperture is normally wide open at f2.8 (with shutter speed setting the exposure). That means that depth of field is always poor. Minimum aperture is f7, by the way. And then I found that I could not focus manually! Other than that, digital cameras require so much paraphernalia that you need to carry when on an overseas trip: extra memory cards, battery charger, USB cable, memory card reader, extra batteries, etc.

Ultimately, I decided that the almost $500 I had spent was not a good photographic package and certainly nothing like equivalent to a 35mm SLR camera purchased for the same money.

So what to do? I took the Olympus back and instead purchased a small automatic 35mm camera with a good zoom and automatic focus, for just over $100. It’s a simple "point and shoot" camera. And for under $25, I purchased enough film for 200 photos. My wife loves it.

I will buy a digital camera, eventually. But not yet. By the way, it now looks as though a much better choice, for not much more money, would have been a Fuji E550. So there you go.

Leo Simpson