C_o_s wrote:
My favorite compact cameras for years have been the Olympus Tough line, especially since I snorkel and dive, and also like to take close-ups, which those cameras excel at. But as gradually got more and more into photographing birds, I wanted a camera with a lot of zoom. I wanted to be able to fill the frame with a bird without having to get close enough to spook it. So I posted on a forum here asking for advice, and ended up getting a Canon SX70 HS four years ago this week.
It has the makings of a great compact superzoom, but it misses the mark. I feel like they had the technology and optics to make an excellent camera and they _chose_ not to. I feel very ambivalent about this camera - there are some things I love about it, and some things about it I find frustrating or infuriating.
What I like most are the zoom - it really is amazing - and the picture quality. It's pretty good for a compact, if you have decent light and focus. And while it's a bit bigger than I'd like (and a bit bigger than the Olympus Tough compacts), it's still small enough to fit in my back pocket - just barely. So I'm happy with the size, though it's the largest I'd go.
One way I think they missed the mark is that they apparently ignored nature & wildlife as a use case when designing this camera. It has quite a depth of features geared not for nature. For example, it can detect babies' faces and track them with the focus - human babies only. I'm honestly puzzled as to why their feature development was so completely geared towards home & social use. Sure, these features will be useful to many people, but it seems to me that the overlap between wanting those, and wanting a superzoom, is mostly coincidental. Nature & wildlife, on the other hand, must correlate much better with wanting a superzoom, yet Canon seems to have completely ignored that.
An example of that is that this camera does not have built-in GPS! I honestly didn't even think of that when buying it, because it had been many years since I'd seen a compact camera that didn't have built-in GPS and I assumed they all had it. The only reason I didn't return it immediately after opening the package & manual and discovering this, is that it has a GPS feature using bluetooth linked to a smartphone. But even though that makes it minimally usable for me, it's fiddly and frustrating. You need to install an app on your phone, and the camera connects to it, but it frequently disconnects while you're out and about using the camera. Either you don't notice, and take a bunch of photos without GPS info, or you learn to always pay attention to whether the GPS marker turned off, and then you notice it just as you're about to take a photo and have to decide between bringing up the app and waiting 5-20 seconds to take the photo, or taking it without GPS anyway. The app itself is confusing at first, and has a "wizard" that makes it hard to know what you're doing or to re-try things or to see what failed. Even once you get it full working, because it's on a touchscreen where the entire screen is "active", if you accidentally touch the screen after it (re)connects to the camera and you want to close the app - oops! You just started the wizard and disconnected the camera from GPS again! This whole system is unreliable, flaky, and messy.
It's not just the app that has a bad interface; the camera's UI is pretty awful too. Several features that would be useful are effectively inaccessible because it's too hard to use them when using the camera. Or, they're semi-accessible but you have to take the camera away from your eye, hold it in both hands, and pay attention to screen menus, in order to use the feature. For example, a number of features use the spinning wheel to adjust something up/down, but the wheel is also a set of four function/directional buttons, and unlike with other cameras, this is not a wheel you spin from its side. To spin the wheel you have to press down on the outer rim of the wheel. You can see where this leads: You wanted to spin the wheel, but instead you just pressed one of the buttons. Switching into and out of macro mode is one of these things that requires pressing a button on the wheel and then spinning the wheel one step; I've lost a lot of insect photos by trying to switch to macro mode and mis-pressing the buttons and by the time I have it sorted out, the bug has flown away. Even after years of practice, it's still hard to get consistently right.
Another big, frustrating flaw in this camera is the autofocus. I've had 4 models of Olympus Tough and two other kinds of compacts before I got this one, and I'm pretty sure this is the worst autofocus I've ever experienced on a compact camera. It's nearly always very slow. It's really bad at picking out foreground vs. background. It gets worse in medium-low light (like, even in full daytime, if it's cloud and you're in the shade of a tree) and also gets worse when zoomed out a lot. Since superzoom is the whole point of getting this camera, for me, I experience the latter a lot. I'll frame a bird filling the entire middle 1/2 of the frame, and the camera will decide to focus on the tree in the background, and the only way to change its mind is to (slowly) un-zoom, re-focus, and try zooming again in increments. Or, it'll refuse to focus on anything at all. I've lost so many great bird photos to this autofocus, because they flit away or fly before I manage to get focus even if I had the bird cleanly in the frame for 10+ seconds.
This camera does have manual focus, which in theory could save a lot of these situations, but here we run into the UI problem again; manual focus is one of the features that's effectively not usable because of an awful interface. There's no way to quickly move the focus to the general ballpark, and then fine-tune it, because it's the same up/down buttons for both fine tuning and gross adjustment. You can only do gross adjustment by holding down the button for up or down, wait a couple seconds for it to move slowly, and then suddenly it speeds up. So of course you overshoot the distance you wanted, and now you want to go the other way... and to do that, you have to wait through the very slow fine tuning until it speeds up and overshoots again. It's awful. It takes even longer than coaxing the autofocus by repeatedly zooming out and back in in increments. After the first couple of years, I completely gave up on even trying to use manual focus on any creature that might move, because by the time I can focus on anything with it, the creature will most certainly have moved. Even if it's a heron.
Nonetheless, despite these frustrations, I've kept using this camera for four years. I do think about replacing it sometimes, but haven't gotten around to it. Overall, it takes good pictures, and I've gotten a lot of photos with it that I never would've gotten without a superzoom. But I've also missed a lot of great photos I should have been able to get, because of its flaws.
What's sad is that it seems like Canon could have so easily done better with pretty much the same camera design. They could add a built-in GPS, and improve the interface, while keeping the size and optics the same, and probably not adding much to the price either. I don't know if all Canon compacts have awful autofocus, so I don't know how easy it would be for them to do better on that, but if the manual focus were easy to use while actually holding up the camera aiming at something, that'd go a long way toward mitigating that flaw. Such a camera - an SX70 HS with GPS and with a usable interface - would blow the real SX70 HS out of the water in terms of quality and satisfaction. Make the autofocus just average quality and average speed for a compact, and it would be a truly excellent compact.
