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Travel Zoom Shootout 2011: Shooting and Gallery

Six pocket long zoom digital cameras compared

Select a topic --------------------------------- 1. Intro, Design and Handling 2. Display, Menus and Modes 3. Lens, Movies and Low Light 4. Shooting and Gallery 5. Lab Test Results 6. Conclusion --------------------------------- Reader Comments on Review --------------------------------- Digital Camera Comparometer (TM) --------------------------------- <-- Digital Cameras (Home) <-- Digital Camera Reviews Index

Shooting with the cameras

As with all products, each of these travel zoom cameras has its own personality, with plenty of foibles, but also quite a few cool features. Taking them in turn, we'll just mention a few more impressions of their operation and features before getting into the image analysis.

Rough and ready is how we'd describe the Nikon S9100, despite its meager grip. It powers up quickly and its controls are responsive right away. Among all the cameras with panorama mode, it's the easiest. You just turn it on, press the shutter button, and start moving the camera in any direction. The S9100 detects your direction of motion and begins recording the panorama.

Easy comes with a small price, though, as the S9100 makes more errors than some of the other cameras we've seen, depending on the subject.

Dave had to work a little harder to capture this panorama of the Roswell City Hall, primarily because he was shooting uphill and angling to get the top of the building while the Nikon S9100 was struggling to compensate. So there are a few more errors in the top of the building and in the trees than you'd normally see. The S9100 handled the exposure well enough, though, especially shooting into the Sun as it was.

Still, we thought the Nikon S9100's strong suit was taking still images with that impressively long zoom. Its Vibration Reduction worked very well to stabilize photos, important with an 18x zoom. We also liked that you could shoot 2-megapixel still images while recording video, and the video remained uninterrupted. Still, lack of more exposure control was a bit of a disappointment; if you're looking for a little more control, you might want to consider another camera.

By far the greatest pleasure of shooting with the Panasonic ZS8 is its lack of bells and whistles, but it does have PASM. The ZS8 is representing Panasonic in this shootout because its big brother, the ZS10, couldn't compete due to its extremely noisy sensor. The ZS8 does quite a bit better than that camera capturing detail, and though it lacks a GPS and fancy modes, it has what you buy a travel zoom camera for: an image-stabilized 16x zoom that brings home quality images. About the only complaint we could come up with was found in Playback mode, where it's difficult to check focus primarily because it takes so long to scroll around in images.

Otherwise, we found the ZS8 had a great grip, worked responsively, and was great in low light. Incidentally, problems in low light was a particular problem with the ZS10, and the ZS8 runs counter to that tendency. Among all the cameras we tested, the ZS8 was most reluctant to raise ISO to get a good exposure. That's an admirable trait.

The Casio EX-ZR100 did considerably better than we expected. There are a few issues with image quality, particularly overprocessing, but operationally it was a pleasure to use. As advertised, the zoom is smooth and fast, and the ZR100 is replete with special features. On a whim I tried it on the shot at left and liked what it did. I wish I'd have angled up just a little more, but sometimes good enough is just that.

The Casio ZR100 doesn't have a Program mode, per se, just an Auto, Premium Auto, but it also has Aperture and Shutter priority modes, and even Manual mode. The unique camera also has a bevy of high speed capture modes, including 3, 5, 10, 15, 30, and even 40 shots at up to 10 megapixels per shot (it's a 12-megapixel camera).

Its Panorama mode shoots something I haven't tested before: a 360-degree image. You'll find it in the Casio ZR100 Gallery. Because I was also shooting up and down hill, the results aren't great, and there are two city halls in the shot. I'm not sure there's a lot of value to a 360-degree shot, but I'm sure someone will find it.

The only major downside to the Casio ZR100 was that it frequently required exposure compensation, both positive and negative.

Canon's PowerShot SX230 IS stood out from the pack, with a bold color and unique body design. It also has one of the simplest operating styles, with Program, Time-value, Aperture, and Manual exposure modes, as well as Auto, Intelligent Auto, and a host of ready Scene modes on the Mode dial. Just spin the wheel and shoot. Unfortunately, its wide-aspect LCD made framing of 4:3 aspect ratio images more difficult to frame and confirm focus. The 16:9 aspect LCD is really better for framing HD video.

We also found the rear dial to be a bit fiddly, and its lack of icons for the four function buttons was just a little annoying. Lightly pressing on the dial in the four directions brings up an onscreen menu, but most of our testers didn't like this. The lack of any kind of grip was also disappointing. Its final foible was that stubborn flash that insists on popping up every time you power it up, and closes with a loud clack when you power down. We don't need a camera to make a racket every time we turn it off. GPS, which we don't cover in this writeup, is fairly simple; its only problem is a tendency to drain the battery a little too quickly, a universal problem among GPS-based cameras.

But truly, so much of that is operational nit-picking, you can take it or leave it. When it comes to image quality and a rich feature-set, the Canon SX230 has it. The camera's print quality sets it above most others, and its image stabilization also works quite well. Indeed, its low light performance is also quite good, particularly its Handheld NightScene mode, as our test results show. You can also shoot 8.1 frames per second at a usable 3-megapixel size, and its super slow-mo video modes are interesting. Get used to its quirks, and the Canon SX230 is a faithful performer, without question.

Shooting with the Sony HX9V was both a pain and a pleasure: Pain came from the extreme lag before the camera would respond to zoom, mode, or menu commands after powering it on. The rest of the time, the camera was quick, smooth, and responsive, producing good image quality, and when we look at the test results, it just gets better and better.

We also appreciated the ready availability of special features like Intelligent Sweep Panorama and Handheld Twilight mode. Sony pioneered some of these modes, and they're still quite good. Sometimes there's nothing that tells the story as well as a nice panoramic image, and the HX9V's High-Resolution iSweep mode produces a whopping 43-megapixel panoramic image measuring 10,480 x 4,096 pixels!

Of course, if you've invested in a 3D TV, you can take advantage of Sony's ample 3D capabilities, from a simple 3D still to 3D Sweep Panorama.

The zoom lens is smooth, swift, and quiet, yet it's pretty easy to zoom and compose images quickly and get a shot off. The grip is nice and warm, and the camera pockets about as well as any of the competition.

Much as we liked the grip and slick good looks of the Fujifilm F550EXR, we weren't as impressed as we needed to be with its overall image quality, nor the performance of its much-ballyhooed EXR sensor. Overall, the camera would be a contender were it not for the lens, whose upper left and lower right corners are terrible. Its interface is good, reasonably fast at some things, even faster at others, like focusing and zooming. We particularly liked how it quickly zoomed in on found faces post-capture to help confirm focus. Exposure was slow to gain up as we moved from dark to light or vise versa, and as we've already mentioned, all videos start out too bright then dim back down to a good exposure, something you can see happen as you're capturing the video.

When we tried some of the F550EXR's special EXR and Advanced modes, we weren't that impressed. Certainly nothing that exceeded the abilities of any of the others with similar features, including the 360 degree panorama mode. They'd all be more worthy of consideration were the optics more even.

Be sure to check the gallery for some real-world daylight images with each of the cameras, as well as check out the reviews for the Nikon S9100, Panasonic ZS8, Sony HX9V, and Canon SX230.

Gallery Images