Point-and-Shoot Camera

A point-and-shoot camera, also called p&s is a camera that includes a fixed lens that is not removable. Point and shoot cameras are designed to be primarily easier to use, smaller in size, and more versitile than their SLR counterparts. Prosumer point-and-shoot cameras however offer much of the same functionality as SLR cameras, and rival them in image quality and features under certain conditions.

Point and shoot cameras are frequently small and lightweight. Usually they include a motorized zoom lens with an auto focus system, a built-in flash, an LCD display and an optical viewfinder independent of the lens. The main advantages of point and shoots is their low price and their simplicity. But they have some limitations. Usually the lens quality is not as good as the lens available for an SLR resulting in vignetting or soft focus, and it lacks a true wide-angle capacity which can be a problem when shooting landscapes or buildings. Since the sensor is almost always very small, it’s nearly impossible to get “shallow depth of field” of subject farther than 30cm or 1 foot. Their auto focus system is usually quite slow, so it’s a bit hard to take pictures of fast action. The flash is not very powerful and so makes it hard to get nice pictures of distant subjects at night. The fact the viewfinder is not directly aligned with the lens has two inconveniences; first, the closer the subject, the harder it is to get a correctly framed picture, because you don’t see the same thing that will be captured. Hopefully digital point and shoots partially solve this problem as you can see in real-time what the sensor “sees”. But this comes at a price: battery life. Having the screen constantly switched on severely degrades battery’s life, and also in low-light conditions the human eye is much more sensitive and looking at the screen can show only a black image and thus being unusable. Finally except for a few models, the control over the result is limited to preconfigured settings like portrait or landscape.

You have to know that point-and-shoot cameras have very small sensors. That means that the “pixels” on the sensors are very small. This also means the more pixels you have the smaller these pixels are (they all have to fit on the same small sensor). It is interesting to note that a small “pixel” cannot collect that much light. The smaller the pixel the less light you can collect per pixel. That means that a 5 megapixel cam needs more light than a 3 megapixel cam (with same sensor-size). To compensate for this problem, the cameras boost the signal. Unfortunatly, this boosts up the bad signals too (it’s a technical thing - you not only collect light with a sensor but the power of the cam, the temperature of the chip etc. too) and this results in grain/noise in the picture.

This means that if you have a very small sensor (and such are built into nearly all point-and-shoots) with a lot of megapixels, you will need a lot of light (very bright sunny day) to get good looking pictures. If you are inside (for example in a church) you will get grainy pictures very easily. So I would recommend fewer megapixels with a point-and-shoot. In many cases, 4 megapixels would be a good choice. Better go for a very good 3 or 4 megapixel cam (good lens, fast, etc.) than for a 5, 6 or 8 megapixel point-and-shoot.

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