Compact Camera News

We’ve just returned from Sony’s New York City press conference where the company announced a trio of groundbreaking new cameras: the 42.4-megapixel, full frame Sony A7R II mirrorless camera, the 20MP Sony RX100 IV compact camera and the 20MP Sony RX10 II superzoomer.

Panasonic’s LX100 is the top-of-the-line camera in the company’s compact LX series. Compared to other LX models, it is the first camera with an MFT (Micro Four Thirds) sensor. However, the camera doesn’t use the whole image sensor area of 17.3x13mm, so its crop factor is 2.2x instead of the 2.0x of standard MFT cameras.

Olympus launched a new compact camera this morning, the 12-megapixel Stylus 1s. The Olympus Stylus 1s offers new features and other improvements over the previous model but in a similar compact, lightweight design.

Meet Rambo, an octopus at a New Zealand aquarium that's trained to take photos of tourists with a Sony camera. It’s an amazing stunt, which you can see in the below video, but not all that surprising if you know a thing or two about octopuses, which are some of the cleverest undersea creatures out there.

Photokina 2014 in Germany has been covered widely on the Internet already—including our own extensive reporting on the show on Shutterbug.com—so there’s no need for me to rehash the major announcements from the event, such as the latest full-frame cameras from Canon and Nikon and the like. My photo report here is aimed at sharing some wider ranging thoughts and perspectives on this important biennial show and what it told us about photography today and where it might be heading tomorrow.

For a compact camera, the Canon PowerShot G1 X Mark II has a large image sensor; in fact, it is slightly larger than the sensor found in Micro Four Thirds cameras. The G1 X II offers a moderate resolution of 13 megapixels, with maximum resolution in images with an aspect ratio of 4:3. By default, however, the camera is set to an aspect ratio of 3:2 that delivers slightly less image resolution.