POINT & SHOOT

Put down your smartphone and see what the latest batch of digital cameras can do, says Steve Dinneen

Steve Dinneen zooms in on the latest batch of digital cameras

These are testing times indeed for camera manufacturers. Once upon a time, a compact camera was a vital part of the traveller’s arsenal – the best way to remind people how glamorous your life was. Then smartphones arrived, packing increasingly complex capability and spoiling the party – sales of digital cameras have fallen 29 per cent in the past five years, with a high proportion of losses coming from the budget end of the market.

It isn’t all doom and gloom, though. Increased competition has led to a raft of new innovations aimed at protecting the standalone camera from the ceaseless march of the smartphone. Just as smartphones co-opted camera technology, now cameras are integrating features we are more used to seeing on our phones.

One such development is the integration of wifi and even 3G. With traditional cameras, uploading your images can be painfully slow. You need to transfer the shots from your memory card to a computer and sift through them using a photo-editing programme before you can even think about putting them on the web. But in a fraction of the time, you can use your smartphone to Instagram a photo of your dinner (complete with retro filter), upload a “selfie” to Facebook, or post a snap of a street in New York to Pinterest.

Now both Nikon and Samsung have wifi-enabled cameras that run Google’s Android software, allowing you to save your photos in the cloud instantly and upload images to Facebook and Twitter through their respective apps. These cameras are great if you need to instantly send an image to the web (perfect for bloggers, for instance), but the tradeoff is they tend to lack the advanced features of higher-end models.

Other abilities being integrated into cameras include the option to shoot in 3D – something that has failed to catch on in smartphones – to capture HD video, or to wirelessly

share images between cameras (so you don’t have to wait for a dozen group pictures to be taken). Some of these features are great; others little more than gimmicks.

So how do you decide which device to go for? The first question to ask yourself is what you’re going to use it for. If most of your photos have at least one glass of wine in them, you probably don’t want to lug around a 1kg DSLR (you don’t need a rocket launcher to kill a pigeon). Conversely, if you’re a keen bird-watcher, you’re going to end up with a lot of very blurry pictures if you opt for a compact.

DSLRs (digital single-lens reflex) are the kings of the camera world, allowing you to take highresolution pictures in a fraction of a second, even in low light. But they are expensive (at least US$600 for an entry-level model), heavy and can be dauntingly complex for beginners.

Opting for a refurbished camera can knock a significant amount from the price but there are pitfalls. Even cameras that have been officially refurbished by the manufacturer will usually have a limited warranty period – durations vary but usually fall between 90 days and six months, compared with the usual one-year warranty on a new purchase. Taking out an extended warranty is usually an option but this can be expensive, somewhat defeating the purpose of going for a refurbished model in the first place.

There is also a new wave of Compact System Cameras (CSCs) that claim to rival the quality and versatility of DSLRs in far smaller, lighter casings – often at a fraction of the price. While photography geeks tend to turn their noses up at this category, the quality is improving fast. Lastly, a decent compact camera will take images far better than your smartphone and fit easily into your hand luggage. Here is our guide to some of the best new products on the market.