The Point and Shoot is Dead. Or Is It?

In The Beginning

For those of us committed to photography the old point and shoot camera never really mattered. Tiny sensor, limited focal length zoom range, poor low light performance and underpowered flash made these products uninteresting to serious photographers and a perfect tool for those who wanted something small and easy to use with which to take pictures.

Then came the smartphone and that changed. Some camera makers actually made point and shoots that looked like smartphones. No one bought them and they vanished quickly. Smartphones also had tiny sensors, even smaller than point and shoots, but as fewer and fewer people were making prints, the images were looked at on low res phone screens or were posted to social media sites that use massive compression to get all those pictures to populate quickly.

Even the serious makers stopped making point and shoots. The smartphones had won. First, their sensors were good enough for how people used the images. Second, they were incredibly easy to use and produced better looking images than people who had used 110, 126 and Disc cameras had seen, and the cost of taking a picture was effectively zero. While a few point and shoots remained available, they were scarce on dealer shelves and most became special order offerings.

Then the smartphone makers introduced what we call computational photography. Basically the image you see is not what the camera stored, but an image that has been pre-processed and enhanced by algorithms created based on the analysis of millions of snapshots. This computational photography placed real demands on smartphone CPU and memory resources, so the smartphone makers built more powerful smartphones. That in turn drove the price of smartphones up.

The folks who were buying smartphones for pretty much anything other than making phone calls didn’t care. They saw this simple to use and powerful device as perfect. They could text, message, take pictures, record video, play games and bury themselves in miasma of social media. It was all perfect.

The Dead Rise

Then the younger generation got interested in retro stuff. One element of this retro stuff that has gotten very popular is the old point and shoot. Makers are not building new ones, but the value of old point and shoots that was effectively zero began to rise as more people wanted a device that only took pictures, with no other distractions. They still wanted digital files and JPEGs were just fine, because where the pictures ended up were still displays with less resolution than even a fifteen year old point and shoot camera.

This resurgence in interest in point and shoots is unlikely to cause any makers to start up manufacturing again. Like using film, it is a niche play and sales volume is unlikely to be worth the tooling up process for manufacture.

The Other Space

There is however, another space that remains credible, albeit with a smaller audience. That is for a pocket sized point and shoot with superior lenses and wide zoom range, couple to a larger sensor. In this space the 1 inch diagonal sensor is king.

These cameras still exist and are still made, albeit in lower volumes and can be hard to find. They are also not inexpensive. The consistently top rated Sony DSC-RX100 VII sells for $1599 CAD MAP, not much different from a current model smartphone.

However, the serious photographer gets multiple benefits that no smartphone can provide, even with massive amounts of computational changes applied. The owner gets a real zoom lens, not multiple fixed lenses all with fixed apertures and limited focus controls. The size of the sensor, the lens and the space inside a smartphone chassis require significant limitations be adhered to in order to make the camera assembly fit inside the device. By providing actual aperture controls, the photographer has the ability to manage depth of field, natively impossible on any smartphone. The rear screen is about the same size as a smartphone, but as these are “real” cameras, there are more options available. This suits the committed photographer and the person happy with a smartphone neither desires or cares about this level of comprehensive functionality.

The net of things is that the user gets a better quality image due to better lens, better focus and better exposure controls. While some of these cameras may offer some form of “treatments” very akin to computational photography, they are not mandatory and the RAW images if that route is chosen are very rich and deep with over 8 stops of dynamic range at ISO 100. That is more than a smartphone, and this sensor dates to 2019.

Other small point and shoots like the excellent Ricoh Pentax GRIII and GRIIIX offer a larger APS-C sensor and are a more recent build. They are also a little bit less expensive than the Sony unit. The larger sensor means more pixels however the lens is a fixed focal length design and may be found to be less flexible than the lens in the Sony. Ricoh Pentax appears to be the only major maker still strongly committed to this kind of camera.

Wrapping Up

While I personally see no point in embracing an old point and shoot, there is that niche that does. However I like very much the idea of a high quality camera that fits in my pocket that isn’t always doing computational photography, that has real aperture controls, true high ISOs and full control. I know that I am in the minority in this. Many folks are very happy with their smartphone cameras, and if that works for them wonderful. However for myself, and for other committed photographers, they aren’t the right tool.

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