CES 2010 only opened today and we’ve already seen the announcement of 45 new compact cameras. To a great extent these launches have been about manufacturers refreshing their product ranges, but there have been a few interesting additions along the way. As try to dry ourselves off after the latest compact camera deluge, it’s worth taking stock of where these latest models leave the market. What sort of specification should you be able to expect from the class of 2010?
As we’ve become used to, the march of the megapixel continues apace, with 14 megapixels becoming the standard (it’s present on 28 of the new cameras). Meanwhile, thanks in part to the sterling efforts companies such as Panasonic have made to promote the benefits of wide-angle capability on compacts, a similar number of the latest cameras include lenses with a 28mm equivalent field-of-view or wider. And many makers are not stopping at the the already impressive 28mm equiv. – a handful of angularly-adventurous models reach out to an effective 25 or 24mm.
The future of video more clearly defined
HD video is another feature that has become de rigueur this season – 29 cameras offer at least 720p resolution, with a couple of Sony’s latest models stretching all the way to 1080i ‘Full HD.’ We’re also rather pleased to see that more efficient compression algorithms such as H.264 and AVCHD are starting to creep in alongside the card-space-consuming Motion JPEG format. Even so, HD video’s capacity requirements have finally encouraged Olympus to embrace the de facto industry standard SD/SDHC memory card, while Canon and Panasonic move on to the SDXC memory format. SDXC promises cards capable of storing a disorientating 2 Terabytes of data. That should be enough to satisfy your inner Cecil B. DeMille, as it would let you shoot around 480 hours of HD footage.
For now at least, the largest SDXC announced is Panasonic’s 64GB version, which is probably enough for the moment, given that 2TB could store upwards of 400,000 images, even from these latest 14MP beasties. Even so, it’s probably for the best that several manufacturers are getting keen on photo-tagging to help make sense of so many images.
Face Recognition is one of the tagging technologies beginning to show itself in this year’s cameras, while Sony has joined the small club of cameras offering GPS, to allow geo-tagging images as well. And it’s not just image organization on your PC that the camera makers are thinking of with all this image tagging – it’s integration with Facebook, Flickr and all the other websites that the young people seem so keen on, hence Samsung’s CL80 with its undiscriminating attitude to connectivity (both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0).
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