The Ultimate Pocket Camera

By David Em

January 3, 2005

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Every serious photographer needs at least two cameras. A big ruggedized honker with interchangeable lenses for serious work, and a pocketable one that's always on call for snapshots and unexpected photo opportunities.

Recently a number of digital technologies have converged to take pocket-sized cameras to a new level of performance. Response times are faster, megapixel counts are up, storage media capacities are greater, and prices are plummeting. But there are still big performance and design differences in the latest models from the major players.

For the last several weeks, I've been toting around small cameras from Epson, Sony, Casio, and Canon, and testing image storage media from Sandisk and Kingston. Here's a report on the cameras and some of the good, bad, and ugly pictures I took with them.

Thick and Thin

Pocket-size digital cameras are roughly the size of credit cards. They come in two widths: skinny and fat. Fat ones are a little over an inch thick; skinny ones are about half an inch in girth. If you're used to lugging around a standard-size camera, the pocketable models will seem tiny by comparison.

Of the four cameras I tested, Epson's $199 PhotoPC L-410 and Canon's $250 PowersShot Digital ELPH S-410 are of the chunky variety, while Casio's $300 Exilim EX-Z50 and Sony's $400 CyberShot DCS-T3 are in the rail-thin runway model category.

Epson vs Canon

To the casual observer, Canon's S-410 (recently replaced by the $320 5-megapixel S-500) and Epson's L-410 appear very similar. They're about the same size and color, have similar lens, flash, and LCD screen placement, and both feature 3x zooms (approximately equivalent to a 35-105 mm lens on a 35 mm camera) and four megapixel resolution.

As soon as you pick them up though, subtle differences quickly become apparent.

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