Shooting for the best superzoom compact camera

Compact cameras are still considered the most popular for a simple reason: their simplicity. Compact cameras can automatically adapt their settings to present conditions, offer a variety of possibilities with easy operation, and just as important - weigh little and fit easily into a pocket.

Amateur photographers who until recently wanted to upgrade their camera could purchase superzoom and SLR models, with more photographic possibilities and a more powerful zoom. But these cameras came with a high price and were large and heavy.

In the past year, continuing the general trend toward miniaturization, a new category has emerged: a compact superzoom camera with an optical zoom. Although the camera is larger than the tiny models that can be found in the compact category (and is more expensive), it offers an upgrade and it will still fit into small purses and loose-fitting pockets.

In the photography industry they believe this is the future of the compact camera.

Moti Blumenfeld, director of the photography division at Eurocom Panasonic, claims that the Panasonic models in this category, under the brand name Lumix, are even more popular than regular compacts.

"Most of the population have compact cameras with a zoom of about 4X. For anyone who wants to upgrade but isn't interested in a massive camera, this is the ideal solution," says Blumenfeld, "because in spite of the upgrade that people are looking for, they're still interested in a product that is easily portable, and that's why this category is becoming a strong trend today."

The relatively high price of these cameras is a factor. The price range in the compact category is usually NIS 490 to NIS 1,300, while the price range of the compact superzoom is about NIS 1,300 to NIS 2100.

David Alon, the CEO of Aloda, which distributes Olympus, Casio and JCV in Israel, explains that the difference does not lie only in the zoom. "There are several additional parameters in which the compact superzoom offers an improvement, and that varies from one manufacturer to the next. Firstly, this is a category that includes HD-quality video recording almost as a default option; the objective is that in the final analysis there will no longer be any difference between stills and video in popular products. In addition, most of the manufacturers are also improving screen size and quality, battery life and wide-angle photography."

Alon says that the main battleground as companies compete for consumers is over these features, in addition to keeping the actual camera small enough.

In order to get a picture of which cameras are the best, we turned to all the leading manufacturers to check the compact superzoom cameras, and received five cameras that we examined with the help of the Wisebuy.co.il comparison shopping Web site.

Each camera was graded on photographic quality (35 percent), video and sound (15 percent), user friendliness (30 percent), shooting time (the minimum amount of time between one picture and the next - 10 percent) and battery life (10 percent).