Best Buys: Touchscreen Compact Cameras
Top of the shots
Group Test So how did they do? At £120, the Nikon Coolpix S4000 offers great value for money and is a great way into the world of touchscreen cameras. But serious snappers will lament the lack of an optical image stabilisation system, no HDMI port, and disappointing picture quality.
The Fujifilm Finepix Z700 EXR is another camera that offers a lot for your money, but picture quality lets it down. Samsung’s ST5500 is an interesting offering and its connectivity features are second-to-none. A shame though, that Samsung uses MicroSD cards, and some of its touchscreen operations are a little sluggish.
Notching up the Reg Hardware award is Canon’s Ixus 210, which has a superb screen, a good set of features and operates like a dream. The Canon certainly gave the Sony a good run for its money though.
Sony’s Cybershot DSC-TX7 is the most expensive, but you do get lots of great features, good performance and superb handling, and for this reason, it’s our Editor’s Choice. ®
Touchscreen Compact Camera Group Test
COMMENTS
Idiotic article
What a moronic concept for an article. It's like a roundup of cameras with square shutter buttons. A touchscreen interface is not a defining category of a camera, such as compact or SLR. When thinking about buying a camera, one does not narrow the field down to touchscreen only and then begin choosing.
Personally I loathe touchscreen cameras. It's a poorly conceived idea, designed by marketing departments to dazzle the unwary. The orientation of the screen - vertical with your hand at one side - means that pressing the screen moves the whole camera and changes your shot. Touchscreen interfaces only work properly when you can have your other hand behind the screen to support the device and provide counterweight to the screen presses (like on a phone).
"touchscreens are a logical choice for compact cameras"
Logical for who? Not me -- I'd rather rotate a dial, or push some buttons instead of peering at a screen and navigating menus. Or does "logical" mean "save the manufacturer money on components, and the customer hopefully won't notice until its too late".
/cynic
