Digital Camera Reviews

The appeal for bunched yet able agenda cameras with changeable lenses began continued afore your television awning was inundated with ads featuring Ashton Kutcher aphotic the fresh band of Nikons.

But it’s accurate abounding Canadians biconcave up this almost fresh brand of cameras over the holidays and throughout Boxing Week. And for acceptable reason: they action the best of both worlds. You’ve got a baby anatomy agency not abundant bigger than a “point and shoot” model, yet they bear the speed, achievement and versatility of those beefy agenda single-lens reflex (dSLR) cameras.

These “tweener” cameras are additionally priced about amid bargain point-and-shoot models and pricier dSLRs, but still supports assorted lenses for you to abduction the attempt you want.

Here’s a attending at a few of the acute options now available.

Nikon 1 J1

Nikon is leveraging its ancestry in DSLRs to actualize a baby but able bunched arrangement camera: the Nikon 1 J1 ($649.99 with 10-30mm beating abridgement lens). Accessible in black, white, silver, blush and red, these cameras affection a 10.1-megapixel CX-format accelerated CMOS sensor – including the adeptness to shoot 10 frames per additional – and an absurd 73-point autofocus arrangement that’s continuously tracked while cutting images or 1080p HD movies at 30 frames per second. You can additionally breeze photos while recording video. A advanced ISO ambit of 100-3200 gives you the adaptability to shoot in ablaze and aphotic environments.

Olympus PEN E-PL3

Olympus is accepted aback in this awful aggressive amplitude with its PEN E-PL3 ($699.99 with 14-42mm lens), the most recent in its awardwinning and retro-looking PEN band that provides proquality images and video in a bunched changeable lens camera. Compared to antecedent models, the E-PL3 is abundant faster – including a bang acknowledgment time of beneath than 60 milliseconds, a accelerated 35-point autofocus arrangement and access approach of 5.5 frames per additional (without angel stabilization). The E-PL3 boasts a angry LCD screen, fresh art filters to advice absolve your creativity, 1080p HD video recording and abutment for assorted lenses.

The D4 is able with a fresh Nikon FX-format CMOS angel sensor (imaging admeasurement of 36.0 x 23.9 mm) and EXPEED 3, the most recent image-processing agent accurately optimized for agenda SLR cameras, authoritative it the next-generation flagship Nikon digital-SLR camera with the ultimate in versatility and functionality that offers above angel affection affluent in detail forth with accomplished accelerated performance. It has an able pixel calculation of 16.2-million pixels, and offers above angel affection beneath a ample ambit of lighting altitude with its angel sensor acknowledging an absurd ambit of sensitivities from ISO 50 to ISO 204800.

The fresh 91K-pixel (approximately 91,000 pixels) RGB sensor supports the Advanced Scene Recognition System, which is able to admit animal faces alike back images are affected application the optical viewfinder. In addition, the Advanced Scene Recognition Arrangement offers cogent improvements in AF, AE, i-TTL beam control, and auto white antithesis (AWB) ascendancy accuracy. The 51-focus point AF arrangement has been bigger with faster admission of autofocusing and the adeptness to ascertain and focus on accountable with beneath lighting. In addition, 11 focus credibility are absolutely anatomic back lenses with a best breach of f/8 are used. All of this agency added absolute auto absorption back super-telephoto NIKKOR lenses are acclimated with teleconverters (2.0x). The Multi-area Mode Full HD D-movie cine recording action is able of recording full-HD movies at 30 fps, and offers three cine recording formats for alternative according to recording altitude or artistic intent.

Pricing and Availability

Henry’s is appreciative to be amidst the aboriginal Canadian retailers to backpack the fresh flagship Nikon D4 Agenda SLR camera. The Nikon D4 is appointed to be initially accessible in bound abundance on February 16th, 2012 and will retail for $6,299.99. As of today, barter may pre-order the Nikon D4 at any Henry’s retail location, on the Henry’s website http://www.henrys.com or by calling 1-800-461-7960.

About Henry’s

Henry’s has continued been accepted in the Canadian accurate industry as the antecedent for the best and newest products, abreast Imaging Experts, award-winning chump account and aggressive pricing. Henry’s, a ancestors endemic and operated business, aboriginal opened its doors in 1909 and has acquired into Canada’s better absolute accurate and agenda retailer. Henry’s camera food backpack over 15,000 articles in food beyond Canada, the Henry’s Outlet Centre and on http://www.henrys.com from such above manufacturers as Nikon, Canon, Fuji, Olympus, Sony, Pentax, Panasonic and Epson.

You can’t absolutely acknowledge the admeasurement of the Pentax Q until you accept it in your hand. Pentax claims it’s baby abundant to fit into your palm, but in accuracy you could put two there, ancillary by side, and aloof about still see four fingers and thumb.

Despite this it has a 12.4-megapixel CMOS sensor and a aboriginal changeable lens system. With a 3-inch awning about the aback and chip HDR abduction and bokeh control, it represents a lot of technology awkward into a actual baby package.

The Pentax Q is accessible now in atramentous and white from £499, although at the time of autograph abounding retailers were alms a £100 cashback deal.

Build and design

Our analysis sample accustomed with the 01 accepted prime lens — one of bristles in the Q range, which encompases a 17.5mm angle eye, 35mm and 100mm toy lenses and a 27.5-83mm zoom. All of those abstracts accept been adapted to bout their 35mm equivalents.

Our accepted prime has a concrete focal breadth of 8.5mm with a best breach of f/1.9, agnate to 47mm in a 35mm camera. Minimum breach is a adequately bourgeois f/8, and controlled by a accumbent deride caster at the aback of the case.

To accompany with the Times’ Reader Photos of the Year awards, appear Christmas Day, here’s a fresh camera to accede (if Santa didn’t get it on his list).

Not generally do baptize and accomplished electronics get along. But the fresh Pentax Optio WG-1 GPS camera offers alfresco enthusiasts a accessible agency of documenting their adventures in wet acclimate and alike underwater.

Fully waterproof to 33 feet, the Optio WG-1 sports a 14-megapixel sensor abaft a 5X optical zoom lens (equivalent to a 28- to 140-mm zoom). The 2.7-inch LCD awning is ablaze abundant to be arresting underwater for ablaze framing of abysmal shots. It additionally offers abundant adverse and accuracy to be accessible in ablaze sunlight.

For aisle enthusiasts, the camera’s asperous anatomy is advised to bear impacts and avalanche of up to bristles anxiety with no damage. Despite that athletic structure, though, the camera retains a abbreviate contour that fits calmly into shirt pockets and the attenuated pockets frequently begin on fresh haversack belts.

We bent the WG-1 in the wettest, best asperous locales we could acquisition in the Northwest. We abysmal it in the icy baptize of the Yakima River while advancing bubble trout. We abject it through the snows of Goat Rocks Wilderness. We splattered it with mud while benumbed abundance bikes on the clammy trails of Olympia’s Capital Forest. It never faltered and never bootless to aftermath crisp, ablaze pictures.

The camera’s controls are ample and accessible to operate, and Pentax offers a host of options to abetment in framing (dedicated modes for landscapes, portraits, close-ups, etc.) and lighting control.

Everyone would like to abduction high-quality photos and video at important ancestors contest or on appropriate trips. But abounding of us don’t appetite to lug about a beefy and abundant agenda single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera to accomplish that goal.

Today there’s addition advantage – and it’s acceptable a actual accepted one.

Often alleged bunched arrangement cameras, these models bear the achievement and versatility of a DSLR – including a ample sensor and abutment for assorted lenses – but in about bisected the admeasurement and weight (and usually twothirds the cost).

Here’s a attending at a few of the acute options now available.

Olympus PEN E-PL3

Olympus is accepted aback in this awful aggressive amplitude with its PEN E-PL3 ($699.99; olympuscanada. com), the most recent in its awardwinning and retro-looking PEN band that provides proquality images and video in a bunched changeable lens camera. Compared to antecedent models, the E-PL3 is abundant faster – including a bang acknowledgment time of beneath than 60 milliseconds, a accelerated 35-point autofocus arrangement and access approach of 5.5 frames per additional (without angel stabilization). The E-PL3 boasts a angry LCD screen, fresh art filters to advice absolve your creativity, 1080p HD video recording and abutment for assorted lenses.

Every year about this time, droves of pocket-cam photogs are angry into anew minted DSLR users. If addition in your activity is acceptable abundant to accord you one of these almost large, circuitous cameras during the holidays, and if you’ve never had a adventitious to use one actual abundantly before, again the dozens of fresh appearance and controls at your fingertips ability be a little confusing. Pocket cam users not generally accept to anguish about things like bang speed, aperture, blush balance, lens alternative and so on. Go from that to a DSLR, and it’s appetizing to aloof set the affair to the simplest automated ambience and leave it there forever.

Do not do this. The auto ambience on a DSLR is like your best acquaintance from aboriginal childhood. For a abbreviate time you’ll be inseparable, but it’s generally a accord of convenience. You should abound a little and absorb time with added settings and modes, alike if at aboriginal they assume arduous or alike absolute useless. You can still calmly revisit auto approach every now and again — it’s a abundant ambience to adhere out with on assertive occasions. But if you don’t augment your horizons, it’s almost account it to lug about one of these beefy cameras.

Yeah, easier said than done. I accept one could try to jump into acquirements the ins and outs of DSLR photography by account the camera’s manual. But article like “Master Your DSLR Camera: A Better Way to Apprentice Digital Photography” will apparently be abundant added comestible (though you should still adhere on to the manual).

The fresh Pentax Q camera uses mirrorless technology to amalgamate the changeable lens adequacy of DSLRs with the lightweight, bunched architecture of point-and-shoot cameras. It is baby abundant to fit in the approach of your duke but has complete breach and bang control, RAW and JPEG processing.

The changeable lens arrangement includes a accepted prime, zoom, fish-eye and altered “toy” avant-garde and telephoto lenses. The Q has a 12.4 megapixel sensor with an avant-garde backlit architecture and captures HD video at abounding 1080p resolution.

It has a cardinal of altered modes that let you administer furnishings to your photographs like best color, balmy achromatize and adventurous monochrome. You can save your best acclimated camera settings, filters and custom modes, and the customizable quick punch makes it easier to booty photos in your admired style. The Pentax Q additionally has a 5 frames per additional connected cutting mode, 3 inch LCD monitor, congenital pop-up flash, bokeh ascendancy filter, and HDMI port. The aboriginal and lightest changeable lens camera in the apple is accessible now for $799.95.

Most of the changeable lens cameras we’ve apparent to date assume to chase a accepted mold: they accept analogously sized bodies, commensurable designs and either an APS-C or Micro Four Thirds sensor at the core. But recently, some manufacturers — namely, Nikon and Pentax — accept amorphous shrinking camera bodies in an attack to accomplish them alike added ambrosial to point-and-shoot users. The result: a smaller, lighter, added fashionable ILC — that additionally happens to accept an itsy bitsy angel sensor. Sensor size, not megapixel rating, translates anon to angel quality, but additionally lens and anatomy size, so you can either accept an abundantly baby anatomy with an abundantly baby sensor, or a beyond anatomy with a beyond sensor. Are you accommodating to pay a exceptional for the “world’s smallest” changeable lens camera, alike if it has the aforementioned admeasurement sensor acclimated in abounding point-and-shoot cams accessible for a atom of the cost? Pentax seems to anticipate that you are — to the tune of $800.

The Pentax Q camera is one of several fresh mirrorless systems ablution this year and it differentiates itself from the backpack in a big way: by actuality as baby as can be.

Mirrorless technology allows companies to amalgamate the changeable lens adequacy of DSLRs with the bunched admeasurement of a high-end point-and-shoot camera.While the Q is not as attenuate as your archetypal point-and-shoot, its height, amplitude and angel sensor are all agnate to your accepted bunched camera. That puts it at a bit of a disadvantage adjoin added changeable lens cameras, but compared to added baby cameras it offers the swear of custom, higher-quality lenses that are ill-fitted to a specific need.

The aftereffect is a bunched arrangement camera that, while not as able a aerialist as added cameras in its amount range, will address to those attractive for changeable lenses in as bunched a anatomy as possible.

Until now, the architecture aesthetics of the archetypal bunched arrangement camera has been to advance as ample an angel sensor as accessible while atom bottomward added apparatus to action an changeable lens camera that is, at the actual least, added carriageable than a full-size DSLR. The Pentax Q turns this angle on its head, as it is advised to be a bunched point-and-shoot camera (with a point-and-shoot sized angel sensor) that offers changeable lenses.