A big small camera
Posted
August 31, 2007 
Comments(3)
Comments(3)
Sigma is releasing the DP1, a compact camera with a “full-scale sensor” (about 7-12x larger than most compact digitals), a 28mm (equivalent) F/4 prime lens, shutter and aperture priority or manual exposure control, and a 2.5″ LCD.
I want that in my pocket now, not later.
Ooh!
Although….
(1) I don’t get how it’s full-scale, but it has a “16mm (28 mm equivalent)” lens. I thought, since it was full-scale, there was no “equivalent” nonsense?
(2) 14MP, but with Sigma’s usual “three-layer” thing so the effective image size is one-third of that… Still novel, though!
(3) f/4?! When seemingly pulling out all the stops (err, no pun intended) on building an out-of-its-league camera, you’d think they could do better. (Especially with a prime lens? Which is another complaint on a camera like this?)
(4) 1/4000th – 30 sec shutter, though, which is pretty impressive. Try finding a P&S that will go that far on either end.
(5) Things such as ISO sensitivity are conspicuously absent.
As an aside, I was thinking just the other day that maybe small sensors were the way of the future. My camera is 37-370 equivalent with a tiny lens, because it’s got a small sensor. Image quality isn’t bad. Smaller sensors almost seem to make more sense.
Despite having just listed things I don’t like about this… I, too, would love to have one! 🙂
1) When they say “full scale”, I think they’re comparing it to (most) current DSLRs with APS-C sensors
3) f/4 does seem a little high… I was hoping for more like f/1.8, or at least f/2.8
I’ve contemplated looking at Olympus’ line of DLSRs which are built around smaller sensors; it seems like the smaller cameras could be nice.
That said, I’m still a big fan of larger sensors, a la my trusty D30. And then there’s the CMOS/CCD argument…
There is something to be said for having a nice big camera. 😉 (I actually had a dream that I was trying out a medium-format digital camera in a store…? It was pretty spiffy.)
I guess I was kind of hoping for my ‘dream’ camera, something that wouldn’t necessarily have the best image quality or the most features, but that would always get the shot, even in the dark: they had a chance to put a nice fast lens on this, and a full-frame sensor that can produce fairly clean images at ISO 3200… There are so many times when I’d love to have a camera like that, for all those really dark lighting situations where a flash either won’t work or isn’t appropriate.
Meanwhile, I’m still giving strong consideration to this. It’s basically just an upgrade to mine, but it goes wider (28mm vs. 37mm), manual zoom and usable AF, a nice huge LCD, a ‘super macro’ mode (1cm focusing distance — I tried photographing an adjacent camera in the store using this, and thought the other camera was going to bump the lens before I got close enough. Wow!) The “face detection” is something that the ‘serious’ camera sites aren’t going into, but the idea is actually neat — it’ll fairly reliably pick out the faces in a photo and ensure that they’re well-exposed and all. (Of course, this is a mode you have to turn on–it won’t be there to screw things up when you don’t want it.) $275 after rebate, too… Nice.