Compact System Cameras - An exciting development

Will Cheung

An exciting development...

I believe that the compact system camera is the most exciting development in photography for many years. It offers the take-everywhere convenience of a typical compact with the option of interchangeable lenses, and all the great features you would expect form a traditional SLR-type camera, in a small compact body. The Samsung NX10, the Olympus PEN family, Panasonic G-series and the Sony NEX camera are all examples of the compact system camera.

What the camera designers have managed to do is dispense with the reflex mirror mechanism of the SLR type camera. In practice, this means there is much less noise when the picture is taken, and it also allows for much smaller cameras.

Not having a reflex mirror means the camera either has Live View for composing pictures on the monitor like on a compact camera, or it has the option of an electronic viewfinder. The Samsung NX1O, for example, has both a monitor and an electronic viewfinder and switching between the two is automatic when the can era is brought to the eye.

The other important benefit of the design of the compact system camera is to do with sensor size. In a compact camera, the digital sensor is small, and while this works perfectly well in good light, when the ISO setting is increased to ISO 400 and above, images suffer from digital noises a sort of grainy texture that affects the fine detail in pictures.

In digital SLR cameras, the digital sensor is larger resulting in higher-quality images with insignificant noise levels except at the very highest SO settings.

Compact system cameras use similarly sized sensors to digital SLRs, so the image quality is of the same high level. Add to this interchangeable lenses, great handing and innovative features such as the Sweep Panorama mode of the Sony NEX cameras and it is easy to appreciate why these cameras have caught the imagination of camera users of a levels.