I am back with some single-figure-megapixel digital cameras to answer the question of whether bigger numbers are always better.

More is more

While I pretty much answered the question in my earlier post – Cheap Digicam Showdown (the answer was no) – I didn’t really go into any detail or give many reasons. My main reason was that for what I need, on-screen display, only a couple of megapixels are required, if you favour regular-size prints or display on a 4k screen then that figure would go up to 8 megapixels, but even for large posters 12 MP is probably enough unless you are looking very closely at the poster. (That isn’t really how posters are supposed to work)

With more pixels you can enlarge more, be that to print a huge image or to zoom in on a small part of a larger image, but in the end there will be diminishing returns – you can’t zoom in forever as things like camera shake and other irregularities will prevent you capturing that much detail in the first place.

That isn’t of course the full story, some of the early cheapo digital cameras were not great cameras, and some were perhaps not so honest about their specs and capabilities as others. As you would expect, there was a difference between a £100 camera and a £1000 one, a big factor being the size of the optics.

Less is more

In addition I’ve noticed a couple of new things happening in photography and wanted to explore them.
One is that a recent trend of people using compact cameras for blogging has caused a spike in prices. I will explore this, and of course, find cheap alternatives in a later post.

Another thing I’m seeing is people using single-digit megapixel cameras to achieve a nostalgic effect, similar to that achieved with digital cameras from the early 2000’s. Those types of cameras are what I am going to explore here, with a comparison of three quite different cameras, which when new, were aimed at very different customers and budgets, but now you can get your hands on them all for around the same price!

There is a bit of a gap in the 2000-2010s between the time when I saw my phone camera (a Nokia E71 with 3MP) as a bit of a gimmick, to when I actually started using my phone seriously for photos (a Samsung Galaxy S3 with 8MP). Similarly the (cheaper) cameras of the time started to seem less like toys and more like proper tools.
These cameras all fit nicely into that gap.

Samsung Digimax S500

This camera is not one of my recent acquisitions, I bought it when it was reasonably new, in 2006 and paid close to what the original catalogue price was, £135. Five years ago it would have been worth next to nothing, these days I could get maybe £30 on ebay for it. That’s the recent popularity causing an upturn in prices.

It is a pretty well-specced camera with a lot of features – some good, some pretty situation-specific, but a decent all-rounder and capable device.
With Auto, Program and Manual modes you can let the camera do everything or set your own Aperture and Shutter Speeds, though sadly there aren’t Aperture- or Shutter-Priority modes where you just set one of those. It has a 3x Optical zoom which is handy for a good range of distances, but the extra Digital zoom to 5x will not give great results as it will eat away at your megapixel count, producing poor quality images.

It lacks a viewfinder, instead relying on a relatively large LCD screen for composing shots. Unfortunately, this is paired with a significant drawback: the camera is powered by just two AA batteries, which tend to drain quickly. The camera is also pretty fussy about the batteries power output, having owned it for a number of years I’ve tried all the options – rechargeable or non-alkaline batteries are no good at all and I ended up exclusively using lithium AA batteries which were and still are about £5 a pair and learned the habit of taking them out of the camera after every shot to avoid draining them.

Focus is automatic, though can be switched between single and multi point detection as well as locked-in with a shutter-half press. It even has a “focus range” effect, which although a bit fiddly to pull off, is an early version of the “portrait” or blurry-background mode we see on a lot of devices now that produce professional-looking results. The trick to do it on a manual camera is to use a wide-but-slightly closed aperture and to position yourself at half the distance in front of the subject as the subject is in front of the background to want to be blurry. Simple on an SLR but tricky to pull off on a compact camera, so it’s a nice addition.

Samsung seemed to stop making dedicated cameras in 2015, though there was never an official announcement. They continue to be one of the largest smartphone manufacturers.

Party Trick: AEB

This camera has exposure compensation which allows you to brighten dim areas or add a little moodiness to bright scenes even before you take the shot, but a surprising addition is an AEB (Automatic Exposure Bracketing) feature. This automatically takes three pictures with three different exposures (brightness) values. The idea (at the time) was to be able to hedge your bets and hope that between the three shots there would be one that was just right, but in practise it was somewhat overkill and rarely required.

However the feature also had another, perhaps unintended use: HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. The three differently-exposed pictures can be combined digitally to produce a new image with a greater (or more evenly-spaced) range between the lightest and darkest areas. The effects can vary wildly, sometimes not noticeable and sometimes very dramatic if slightly unreal. The effect has been perhaps overused and is now sometimes considered undesirable, with critics calling it artificial-looking where colours seem to glow and produce strange artifacts on the image, the most common being a “light-halo” which wasn’t present on the standard image.

The feature on this camera isn’t quite a full AEB system, as it takes the three pictures one after the other instead of simultaneously, so any movement in the scene would cause problems and even aligning the images perfectly needs an extra step in the process. Many modern devices, such as phones now have this feature, or an emulated version of it as standard – including the software used to generate the effect.

Rollei DK4010

I wanted to compare with something a bit different, so I recently acquired this camera – which is what might be best known as a Bridge Camera. As the name suggests these were designed to bridge the gap between compact cameras and SLRs – with more features and control than the compact cameras, but without the expense and complication of interchangeable lenses. I can see the appeal, they are professional-looking cameras that don’t break the bank, but I’d never really considered them as I’d rather have a slightly-older version of the real thing. It was nearly £300 when new back in 2004.

This one however is something a little bit more than that, as it’s what we’d now probably call a Compact Bridge Camera. It has a decent feature list with manual modes, has a larger lens with a lot more optical zoom than the compact, yet still manages to remain a lot smaller than the SLR. The current trend is away from large SLRs with compact mirrorless cameras occupying the top of the range, so modern bridge cameras tend to follow that styling.

This camera was very much ahead of its time, delivering a serious offering in a compact package. Instead of being a big showy camera that only looks the part, it’s a small device that packs a surprising punch. It can only do this with a little compromise though, despite the large lens the sensor behind it is actually very slightly smaller than the Samsung’s.

Sadly the once-renowned brand of Rollei had long-since gone bankrupt and existed only as a trading name bought and sold between investment companies and this camera is actually a rebadged Kyocera Finecam M410R. Kyocera themselves stopped making cameras in 2005, bringing to an end the once-great camera brands Kyocera, Yashica and Contax. All formerly had links with Carl Zeiss and the lens in this camera is named a D-VarioApogon to suggest a link to those glory days, but it was all just branding by this point and the word Vario itself just means a lens that can vary the focal length and focal distance – ie: a type of zoom lens.

It has a viewfinder, but it is electronic with a small screen inside showing the view through the lens. It has a sensible-sized (ie: small) screen on the back which is small enough that it doesn’t drain the 4xAA batteries too quickly, although by habit I tend to take the batteries out when not using it. As well as all the usual info the screen can show a histogram indicating the spread of light and dark areas in the frame so that you can compose balanced shots.

It doesn’t have a fully-manual mode, but hidden in a confusing menu inside the EXT mode that looks just like the usual icon for Manual, it does have Aperture- and Shutter-priority modes, which in my experience are the most-useful ones to have.

It also has an AEB mode that functions the same as the Samsung, with three pictures taken in sequence. Another atypical feature is a long shutter mode for capturing dark scenes, the night sky or vehicle light trails.

Party Trick: Fast Shooting

Something which is not really a requirement for the average user, but useful to professionals is fast shooting. That’s the ability to take several pictures quickly one after the other. Pros use it to capture many images at an event they are covering and can sort through the best pictures later on. For your average user it’s more situational, in that you might want to get some quick shots of a race, or a one-off event, but usually you’ll leave it off so that you don’t fill up the memory card.

This feature was typically only a thing on the highest-end cameras, where the prices were justified by the camera being tools for work, so it’s rare to see it on a cheaper camera. The original specs and reviews suggest it was “only” limited by the speed of the memory card – well, heh heh heh, we’ll see about that – memory cards are a lot faster now than when this camera came out. The camera can use SD cards up to 2GB in capacity, so that should be good for at least 1,000 pictures at 4MP.

Canon 300D

This is the oldest camera, but also has the most megapixels, there’s no special trick to achieving this, it simply has a much larger sensor behind the lens. It was Canon’s first entry-level SLR, still pricey but the first to cost (just) under £1000 new with a kit lens.

I have been buying old cameras for a while and while the flagship cameras still cost a fair few pennies, the cameras that were mid-range or entry-level can be picked up pretty cheaply. Is the original 4MP EOS 1D (£204 on mpb.com) objectively better than the 6MP 300D? Yes. It’s got a larger sensor and shoots faster and over a wider brightness range. Is it 10x better in terms of price second-hand today? Probably not unless you have very specific needs.

Despite being the entry-level the 300D has plenty of features and can pretty much do anything you need. It of course has your auto and manual modes with exposure compensation, focus area or spot selectors, and a few situation-specific scene modes like fixed depth-of-field, night shooting and infinity-focus for landscapes.

It has a proper viewfinder (5) that uses the actual real view through the lens, because as a real SLR it has the mirror inside to do this. As a result you don’t use the screen on the back to frame your shot because until the shutter fires, the mirror (2) is blocking the light path to the sensor (7).

For fast shooting it leaves the mirror up and claims to manage 3 shots per second, which is about what reviews say the Rollei is capable of. This isn’t that big of a deal for an SLR and quite a bit slower than the higher-priced Canon models, but the limiting factor is the buffering speed of writing to the memory card.

Not only does it use Compact Flash cards, which haven’t seen the same sort of leaps in speed that we see in new SD cards, as they are not used much anymore, but it also creates much larger files, especially if you shoot in RAW format, so eventually the buffer gets full and it cannot keep up – so probably only works in short bursts – something else I can test.

It has an AEB mode with an adjustable interval, but which still works the same as the other two cameras and takes three succesive shots – the instant AEB feature didn’t appear until a few years later. Oddly there’s also a White-Balance bracketing mode where instead of different brightnesses it captures three different colout temperatures – I’ve not noticed that before and I can’t imagine how it would come out if you tried to process them as an HDR image – but it’d fun to find out! I’m guessing “bad”, but still fun.

The camera itself of course can be paired with any compatible lens, so some features will be dependent on that, but the kit lens you could buy it with was an 18-55 zoom lens with autofocus and camera-controlled aperture. That is about a 3x zoom and useful in most common situations and represents a trade-off in quality by being reasonably small and light, but is still an absolute monster compared to the little specks of glass on the front of the other two cameras. There was no automatic stabilisation (anti-shake) in the camera but this could be added with later lenses.

The two best ways for budding photographists to improve their pictures are to have plenty of light and to hold the camera steady – which sounds kind of obvious, but it’s the best lesson to learn and think about whenever you take a shot and something I always try to remember.

Getting plenty of light is what having the bigger lens on this camera does for you automatically, more light gives you more shooting options and makes it easier to get good pics.

Using a tripod is the obvious way to keep the camera steady, but you do have to remember to have purchased one and brought it with you. Without one, bracing against solid object like a wall or table can help you keep steady – either press your hand holding the camera against the solid object or make stiff “triangle” shapes by holding the camera in both hands and bracing with your elbows. Trust me, if you keep this in mind you’ll see instant results, even on a phone.

Party Trick: Shooting RAW

Usually digital cameras will take a picture by reading the sensor and converting that to a JPG file which can be quickly written to the memory card. The size (in pixels) and quality (in compression) can be usually be tuned in the camera setup. JPG files can then be easily shared and copied, but they will never be a better quality than the moment they are saved and there is a limit to how much you can adjust them in “post-prod”.

RAW files by comparison give you a lot more options, they save the information directly from the sensor without any compression or loss of quality, so you can potentially get a larger range of brightnesses and even virtually adjust the exposure without losing information. As result the images are larger and can only be read by photo editing software, not shared or displayed.

To shoot in RAW is to release the full potential of the camera, usually that means in terms of dynamic range. The sensor in the 300D creates images with 12 bits per pixel (68 billion colours), whereas JPG images “only” record 8 bits per pixel (16 million colours).

That might sound to you like overkill, and you’d be right for normal usage. Monitors and TVs typically have the same 16 million colour range as JPGs. Regular printers are similar, although specialised photo printers offer 12 bits of colour depth. Our eyes can only distinguish about 10 million different colours. So, while we won’t suddenly be able to see more colours on a 12 bit colour print out, gradients and colour changes will seem more smooth without obvious jumps to different colours.

From an in-camera point of view it means that there’s more information being stored in each image than would be if it was rendered down to a JPEG. It can then be rendered differently in future using photo editing software, adjusting the apparent exposure, balancing or spreading the range of brightnesses or adjusting the colour, such as the white-balance. It’s a bit like a digital version of a film negative – if you only had a small print of a photo from a photo album, it would be difficult to enlarge or adjust it, but it would be much easier if you still had the negatives.

Enough jibber-jabber

Time for some Science! What better way to test the capabilities of my cameras than the I3A/ISO 12233:2000 Resolution Test Chart? Ok you might say that since it is no longer part of the standard I should instead have used a Imatest ISO 12233:2023 Edge SFR chart, but have you seen the prices? £1000 for a printed one. So, I got the old one at a decent size for the price of a download and a printout and stuck it on my kitchen wall.

This is the image in question. Actually it’s a probably not full-resolution copy of the image printed out on a probably not that high-resolution printer and then photographed on my “says it’s high-resolution but I’ve never actually tested it” phone.
Well, now is the time for testing! The image was photographed from about 1m away with the phone set to 50MP using its main F1.6 23mm lens, with the phone mounted on a tripod and the self-timer used to avoid any movement. The highlighted area between 14 and 10 is shown zoomed-in. I have not done any editing other than cropping as something like rotation correction would distort the results.

The pattern of the lines begins to break down between 12 and 14, with the lines seeming to touch and no longer having a definitive white break. This is probably more to do with the maximum resolution of the printer than of the phone and I could probably capture the same level of detail at 10-12MP.

What phones are not very good at is zooming, so just for fun I tried shooting the chart from a distance. While newer phones often have multiple lenses for different set zoom lengths, anything beyond those has to use the dreaded digital zoom, which reduces quality.

The degradation is clearly shown in the above images which use the F2.6 70mm “zoom” lens at 10MP from a distance of 1m, 3m and 10m. At 1m the lines start to break up between 8 and 10, at 3m they start to go between 1 and 3 and at 10m…what lines?

So, the burning question you are all asking is whether a 20 year old camera is better than a modern phone? Let’s find out!

The Samsung point-and-shoot compact

The Samsung, as you might expect, does not outperform the phone in a “fair” fight. At close range the lines start to blur at around the 7-8 mark, which I’ve inset a enlarged section to highlight – this is it simply operating at the edge of its megapixel limit, it cannot capture any more detail.

It is designed as a general-purpose snapper but it does have a moderate optical zoom, so at 3m it’s a slightly different story – the Samsung is almost a match for the phone. You can’t quite see the numbers, but the shapes are discernable. If you look closely at the phone pics for 3m it might at first appear clearer, but there are noticeable oddities around the edges of the shapes where what should be straight lines appear to warp and twist. This is because the phone, which relies entirely on a digital zoom is using modern software to interpolate, or guess the extra detail in the image. In short, the phone is cheating. The Samsung, without this software, is to my mind producing a more “honest” view, and if you’re after that retro low-res vibe is bang-on what you want.

Anything beyond that is out of scope for the Samsung, even at 5m it’s a poor match for the phone at 10m, although both images are pretty unusable.

Rollei compact bridge camera

The Rollei close up can’t compete with the phone either – it just doesn’t have the megapixels, with the lowest of the three cameras, but curiously does very slightly better than the Samsung with the lines blurring between the 8-9 mark.

The Rollei’s strength is its optical zoom, though and at 3m the numbers on the chart are still pin-sharp – so over this range it easily outperforms a modern phone. If the things you want to take pictures of are 3m away, then this is the camera you want in your hands for the job.

At 5m this starts to fall off, as we are beyond the optical zoom’s limit and starting to eat into the meagapixel count with digital zoom, but even then you still get that “honest”, slightly blocky lo-res effect.

Canon digital SLR

The Canon, close-up with a slightly-higher pixel count outperforms the others slightly and the blurring starts to occur from the 9-10 mark. That is as good as you could expect and compares pretty favourably with even the phone which needs nearly 8x the pixels to achieve a very similar result.

I used the kit lens for the 3m shot, which is an inexpensive (because it came with the camera and many people sell if off cheap) lens than zooms from 18mm-55mm. A decent range and a small size that you’re likely to be happy to have fitted to the camera most of the time. It does not outperform the Rollei, as that has a wider range lens (the numbers aren’t comparable as the sensor sizes are different, but the takeaway is that the Rollei can zoom in more), but what the Canon does produce is a very smooth image with what almost looks like film grain – not a blocky image at all. This is perhaps a trick of SLRs to make the images appear more “filmic” but it’s a nice tool to have in the box and a fresh take on the retro look.

Now we leap to 10m, and what this – it’s somehow better? The big advantage of an SLR is that you can change the lens to anything you want, so for this I fitted a 500mm super telephoto mirror lens, and the result is something that none of the other cameras can get anywhere close to. Taking shots at long distances presents its own challenges of course, and simply getting the camera aligned with the image in the viewfinder and keeping it still enough when taking the picture to not get a blurry mess is a struggle in itself.

Conclusion

So, in what I realise is rather a dry post, sticking solely to the science rather than the art, I think it’s been shown that any one of these old cameras still has its place. For general snapping and a light bit of zooming then 5MP is enough for screen display and probably fine for a few small-sized prints. For when your subject is a bit farther away each one gives you an option you won’t get from a phone camera, and for those retro-style shots, then where better to look than an actual bona fide retro camera. Also, as always on this blog none of them are going to break the bank.