Thread: Anyone with a DSLR also have P&S camera

I don't think a P&S is a 'bad' camera that takes 'worse' photos. The photo is more about the photographer than anything else and there's really no substitute for spending time with the manual to understand how your camera works.

Two of the big camera issues are focus and colour/tone of the image - both mentioned in this thread. Learning how to set the focus mechanisms of the camera will fix the first and figuring out the image settings of the camera (saturation, sharpness) will probably fix the second.

Fully automatic focus point selection can't read your mind and the results will be hit and miss, especially when using shallow DOF. Setting the focus system to focus only on a specified area is how I get around the problem.

The saturation and sharpness settings can usually be tweaked to get images looking the way you want them. I find that all Canon cameras tend to have a really nice look to them straight out of the box; I have to make changes to my Nikon's settings to get a similar effect.

So my criteria for whether a camera is any good or not revolves around the amount of control I can get of it, to do what I want. That usually ends up revolving around the menu system and I've found Canon P&S to have the easiest to use.

On DSLR's, I lean toward Nikon as I just don't get with the Canon DSLR menu's - yes, they're kind of similar to the P&S but for some reason it just doesn't work for me. Olympus has me baffled with their DSLR menu's. Pentax aren't bad at all and I should probably have one given I've always had Pentax film SLRs (still do) but I just find the ergo's and menus on Nikon DSLRs work well for me.

We have a few P&S in the house, from a sub $100 Samsung to the Canon G1X. My favourite is the Canon S90 as it has full manual control and is nice and small - it lives in a small pelican case and has been everywhere. The images that come from it are great - the only time I get 'poor' results are when trying to get action photos but there are work arounds (pre-focussing and anticipation being the main one). The G1X is our 'car camera' for travelling and works very nicely in lower light but still sucks for action.