SP-100ee vs. Nikon B500

[Michael Meissner]

I have a vacation to Florida coming up in the first week of March, and I'm waffling on whether I need a super-zoom camera. in particular, I was looking at the pictures of the Wakodahatchee wetlands and I noticed that about 1/2 of the pictures were at the long end of my camera/lens combination (E-3 with 50-200mm mark I lens and EC-14 teleconverter, which has an equivalent focal range of 140-560mm), including times when I needed to crop the picture.

With my current gear, I can get up to 600mm now (E-m1 or G85 with Panasonic 100-300mm lens), but obviously it occasionally would be nice to have even more zoom without having to use 2x digital zoom on the Olympus cameras or cropping.

So, I've been thinking about whether it makes sense to get a long zoom compact camera just for the trip and for times after the trip I need more zoom.

At the moment, I don't want to spend all that much (figure US $200-ish) if I do it. My main choice seems to be:

• Buy Olympus SP-100EE
• Buy Nikon B500
• Rent Nikon P900
• Rent Panasonic 100-400mm lens
• Go beyond budget and buy Nikon B700 or P900 (or Canon superzooms)

I never tried the SP-100EE, so I don't know much about it except for the specifications and reviews:

• I would prefer a tilting or articulating screen, but unless I use the camera a lot on tripods, I probably don't need a moving LCD.
• I really like to use the touch screen to set the focus point, and the SP-100EE does not have touch support. However, I have used Olympus cameras for a long time, and I can use the arrow keys.
• It has a viewfinder, but I suspect that it will be problematical to use in bright light with polarized sunglasses on. If somebody still has the SP-100EE, could you tell me how useful is the viewfinder when using polarized sunglasses? On the other hand, the B500 does not have a viewfinder at all.

Has anybody in this group compared the SP-100EE and Nikon B500 in terms of the image quality in good light? How is the camera at the long end of the zoom?

 

[Henry Falkner]

At the moment, I don't want to spend all that much (figure US $200-ish) if I do it. My main choice seems to be:

• Buy Olympus SP-100EE
• Buy Nikon B500
• Rent Nikon P900
• Rent Panasonic 100-400mm lens
• Go beyond budget and buy Nikon B700 or P900 (or Canon superzooms)

I never tried the SP-100EE, so I don't know much about it except for the specifications

Someone has bought my 10 kg accordion For US$ 700.-, It Is now too heavy to play after my hip replacement.

This puts me in the market for the Nikon B700. My reasons are: EVF, 2x+ more reach, articulated LCD for use on my tripod, good feedback on build quality, not as big as the P900. More MP than my travel zooms will be useful, providing this does not make night videos worse than what I get now.

I had totally forgotten about the SP-100ee.

Henry

 

[Michael Meissner]

Someone has bought my 10 kg accordion For US$ 700.-, It Is now too heavy to play after my hip replacement.

This puts me in the market for the Nikon B700. My reasons are: EVF, 2x+ more reach, articulated LCD for use on my tripod, good feedback on build quality, not as big as the P900. More MP than my travel zooms will be useful, providing this does not make night videos worse than what I get now.

Yeah, the B700 looks like a nice camera. I vaguely recall that you had external limits on the type of video (720p?) due to the computer you are using. The problem is the modern 4K cameras might not put as much thought into the 720p support.

I briefly looked at the FZ300/FZ330, particularly as a weather sealed superzoom camera that could double as a secondary video camera. However, one of the takeaways is the 1080p videos were a lot softer, but the 4K videos were great. Since I'm currently not doing 4K video and my only video processing is uploading them to youtube, the FZ300 kind of lost its luster.

I had totally forgotten about the SP-100ee.

Yeah, there were only 1-2 posters in this forum sharing pictures about it.

 

[OzRay]

My curiosity was piqued: https://www.ephotozine.com/article/olympus-stylus-sp-100ee-review-25532 . It has a dot sight!

 

[Enders Shadow]

My curiosity was piqued: https://www.ephotozine.com/article/olympus-stylus-sp-100ee-review-25532 . It has a dot sight!

A friend had one. The RDS was fragile and failed even under light usage. Lens was sub-par, not even i.Zuiko branded. Olympus quickly dropped it from their lineup.

--
Phil

 

[Michael Meissner]

My curiosity was piqued: https://www.ephotozine.com/article/olympus-stylus-sp-100ee-review-25532 . It has a dot sight!

A friend had one. The RDS was fragile and failed even under light usage. Lens was sub-par, not even i.Zuiko branded. Olympus quickly dropped it from their lineup.

Thanks. That tells me what I want to know.

 

[OzRay]

My curiosity was piqued: https://www.ephotozine.com/article/olympus-stylus-sp-100ee-review-25532 . It has a dot sight!

A friend had one. The RDS was fragile and failed even under light usage. Lens was sub-par, not even i.Zuiko branded. Olympus quickly dropped it from their lineup.

One failure, without knowing much, doesn't really mean that every unit was rubbish. And looking in Google, the camera overall got pretty good reviews from all sites.

But it's now a four year old camera and I think they have quite rightly given up on small sensor bridge cameras.

The last larger sensor bridge camera is almost four years old as well. And you only have to look at some of the other small sensor cameras to see how quickly they are replaced.

I think overall Olympus is beginning to reduce the number of options available and rationalising what products sell and what do not.

 

[Henry Falkner]

I think overall Olympus is beginning to reduce the number of options available and rationalising what products sell and what do not.

 

[KeepCalm]

I think overall Olympus is beginning to reduce the number of options available and rationalising what products sell and what do not.

--
Thoughts, Musings, Ideas and Images from South Gippsland
https://australianimage.com.au

In my opinion, Olympus is rationalizing a little too much. They dropped the EVF on their SP bridge cameras when they still did them, the SP100 was the exception.

There were complaints about the fragility of the red dot sight on the SP100. Instead of re-designing that (since nobody else did a red dot sight), they dropped the model.

They dropped the SH-series. In my opinion it was a better small-sensor compromise than the Panasonic ZS series is now.

They Toughs are 3x zoom wonders. I have not touched a digital camera with less than 10x zoom after 2005.

Henry

--
Henry Falkner - SH-2, SH-1, SH-50, SP-570UZ
http://www.pbase.com/hfalkner

The SP100 was never really popular on this forum even from the people who bought it. From what I remember there were some pictures with very smeary foliage in the distance. It could have been depth of field but the images seemed very heavily processed where blur was turned in to a less pleasant smear.

The TG5 is a 4x zoom and I think that bit of extra reach over 3x does actually does make a difference in any compact.

 

[OzRay]

All the decent super-zooms are going to 1" sensors, I don't see the point of having a 1/2.3" sensor in a body that's as big as a DSLR. I guess Olympus doesn't see the point either.

 

[Michael Meissner]

All the decent super-zooms are going to 1" sensors, I don't see the point of having a 1/2.3" sensor in a body that's as big as a DSLR. I guess Olympus doesn't see the point either.

However, there are no 1" sensor super-zoom cameras. Only 3 cameras have the equivalent of 600mm focal length (Sony Cyber-Shot RX10 III/IV and Canon PowerShot G3X). I personally already have that focal length covered with my current micro 4/3rds setup using the Panasonic 100-300mm mark II lens.

What I'm looking for is a camera to use on a vacation where I want more reach than what I have right now. And as I said, I would prefer to not pay all that much.

All of the super-zoom cameras that reach at least 800mm equivalent zoom use the 1/2.3" sensor. And all of them are limited by that sensor and the physics of light transmission. If you look at the lenses, all of the super zooms have lenses f/5.9 and smaller at the telephoto end (and most start out at f/3). Pretty much with these cameras, you need to shoot at base ISO and maybe up to ISO 400 or the noise will kill you. These are not generally cameras you use in bad lighting conditions. And in fact, a common complaint is that the pictures are soft when shooting telephoto in bad lighting.

One of the areas where I want more reach is in a wetlands that is used by the the utilities for treating the waste water before it goes into the ocean. There are various paths that you can walk along, and you can snap photos of the alligators, heron, etc. that live in the area, but you can't get off of the walkways. With alligators around, I would not want to leave the walkways in any case. In addition, my wife currently has back problems and needs a wheelchair to get around, and we would need to stick to the walkways.

As I mentioned in the original article, I looked at the pictures I took there in 2011, and about 1/2 of the pictures were at the long end of the camera I had with me at the time (E-3, 50-200mm mark I lens, EC-14 teleconverter), and most of those pictures have been cropped to achieve the shot that I wanted. If I had had more reach, I would have needed to crop as much.

Here are the pictures I caught back then:

• http://www.the-meissners.org/2011-small-albums/2011-florida-wakodahatchee/index.html

The other place is we are going to do an Everglades tour. On these tours, you are on the air boat, and you have limited time to get the picture, before they go to the next spot. There the issue isn't necessarily maximum reach, but ease of taking a picture where it might be wide angle one moment, and telephoto the next, and you only have seconds to get the shot.

As a thought experiment, the Nikon P500 retails for about $250 US right now new ($165 for refurbished and/or used) and weighs 0.54kg. It can cover a 23mm to 900mm equivalent focal length in one camera.

To cover roughly the same territory in micro 4/3rds, with a minimum of lenses, I would need 2 lenses (Olympus 12-100mm and Panasonic 100-400mm), which gives an equivalent focal range of 24-800mm. The current cost of these lenses new is $3,100 US (plus a body if you were starting from scratch), and the weight of the lenses alone is 1.9kg.

Given I have a good kit already, I would only need the Panasonic 100-400mm lens ($1,800 US) and the weight penalty would be 1kg.

Sure, the micro 4/3rds combo will produce a better picture, but is it worth it to spend 7x times as much for vacation snaps? Yes, if I was doing birding or nature photography more, then it would be worth it. But I'm not. I just want to capture pictures to remind me of the trip, and possibly put a few on the calendar I make for family at Christmas time.

 

[OzRay]

All the decent super-zooms are going to 1" sensors, I don't see the point of having a 1/2.3" sensor in a body that's as big as a DSLR. I guess Olympus doesn't see the point either.

However, there are no 1" sensor super-zoom cameras.

These guys must have got the specs wrong: http://www.techradar.com/news/photography-video-capture/cameras/best-bridge-camera-1259503 as well as these guys: https://www.dpreview.com/products/sony/compacts/sony_dscrx10iv/specifications .

 

[Enders Shadow]

One failure, without knowing much, doesn't really mean that every unit was rubbish. And looking in Google, the camera overall got pretty good reviews from all sites.

If you had been following Olympus compacts when the SP-100ee released, you would have seen multiple reports of the RDS getting stuck in the extended position. It happened to my friend in the first few weeks of ownership. The replacement camera did the same thing after a few months of use. He learned to live with the problem, but dumped it when the P900 became available.

SP-100 on safari

Bought the SP-100 based on recommendations of a 'super zoom' camera for use on our first ever trip to Africa. In general, I was very glad to have it. The zoom is incredible. I could zoom in on something and take a shot, then zoom in on the shot and see what kind of raptor was on a branch on a...

www.dpreview.com

The idea of a integrated RDS sounded like a good idea. But poor CDAF performance limited its usefulness with any sort of action photography. For whatever reason, it wasn't competitive against bridge type super zoom models from Canon and Nikon. About a year following its release, retailers began listing it as discontinued.

 

[OzRay]

I'm not trying to defend the camera, it may well have had issues, but knowing how individuals can complain about things that are often their own fault, I tend to to take such complaints with a grain of salt. And given the dusty etc conditions in which the poster had issues, that may have contributed to the problem.

But overall I suspect that Olympus may well have dropped the product due to lacklustre sales, not build problems. Bridge cameras are really an oddball product in this day and age, especially if they have a very small sensor. That's why the 1" sensors are becoming more prevalent, though at a cost.

 

[Michael Meissner]

All the decent super-zooms are going to 1" sensors, I don't see the point of having a 1/2.3" sensor in a body that's as big as a DSLR. I guess Olympus doesn't see the point either.

However, there are no 1" sensor super-zoom cameras.

These guys must have got the specs wrong: http://www.techradar.com/news/photography-video-capture/cameras/best-bridge-camera-1259503

Lets see:

• The first 4 cameras (Sony RX10-IV, Panasonic FZ2500, Panasonic FZ1000, Sony RX10-III) use a 1" sensor. The Sonys have an equivalent focal length of 600mm (as I said), and the Panasonics have 480mm/400mm;
• The remaining 6 cameras (Canon PowerShot SX60 HS, Panasonic Lumix FZ80, Nikon Coolpix P900, Panasonic Lumix FZ70, Nikon Coolpix B700, and Sony Cyber-shot HX400V) all use the 1/2.3" sensor, and all have equivalent focal lengths from 1200mm to 2000mm.

as well as these guys: https://www.dpreview.com/products/sony/compacts/sony_dscrx10iv/specifications .

That is the Sony RX10 IV mentioned above with a 600mm equivalent focal length.

 

[OzRay]

Obviously my English comprehension skills are lacking. When I read:

However, there are no 1" sensor super-zoom cameras.

I took that to mean that there are no 1" sensor super-zoom cameras (full stop). It must have meant something else and I'm still at a loss.

 

[Michael Meissner]

Obviously my English comprehension skills are lacking. When I read:

However, there are no 1" sensor super-zoom cameras.

I took that to mean that there are no 1" sensor super-zoom cameras (full stop). It must have meant something else and I'm still at a loss.

The trouble of multi-tasking and posting from work is sometimes I think I've written the full sentence. I meant to say that there were no super-zooms with more than 600mm (since I talked about that in the next sentence).

In terms of the SP-100EE, I had been wishy washy on it in the first place. Given there are so few users of it in this forum, it is hard to get opinions since the sample space is so small. But for me, I'm comparing a used camera from 2014 being sold on ebay to new cameras currently being sold. Back in the day when it was new, I thought it was too limited and I didn't go for it back then. I noticed there were some SP-100EE's for sale and put them briefly on my ebay watch list. I also put the Fuji superzoom cameras on the watch list, and removed them when I read the reviews.

In terms of compact cameras, I could have gone for a Stylus-1 refresh, bringing it to a 1" sensor, and maybe bumping the focal length a little.

 

[OzRay]

You should look at a used Nikon 1.

 

[Michael Meissner]

Now, it wasn't one of my original choices, but I made my decision. I just paid for a used FZ-300 for US $346.50 (the current new price at my brick & mortar store is $499.99).

On the face of it, the FZ-300 doesn't give me more zoom range than I have (600mm equivalent focal length with the Panasonic 100-300mm lens), but for a vacation camera, it can allow me to ditch the camera bag with two bodies and at least 3 lenses (12-40mm, 14-150mm, and 100-300mm). Sure, there are times when I will take the big gear, but there are other times, when I want to go back to just having a single camera with no extra lenses.

After posting my initial query, I found I kept coming back to the FZ-80, primarily because of the touch screen. I find with my recent cameras, that using the touch screen to set the focus point to be really helpful, particularly when the camera is on a tripod or monopod. But as I dug through the various reviews and postings in the Panasonic Compact Forum, one theme kept coming back. The FZ-300 was a much better camera than the FZ-80 (sure the FZ-1000 is better than both, but it is more expensive, and it only goes to 400mm equivalent). But of course the FZ-300 'only' had a range of 25-600mm while the FZ-80 had the range '20-1200'. But the FZ-300 is like the Stylus-1 in that it has a f/2.8 constant aperture lens, while the FZ-80 (and the B500, B700, P900, etc.) went down to f/6.x at the long end. This means you can only use the camera in good light at full zoom.

So as I looked into the FZ-300, I discovered the FZ-300 has a feature my G85 and E-m1 don't seem to have. It has an extended optical zoom. If you change the picture setting from the normal 12 megapixels to either 8 megapixels or 3 megapixels, if you enable the extended optical zoom, it will allow you zoom further as the camera crops picture to the smaller size. Sure, you can do this in post processing (and in fact that's what I did in my previous trip), I would find it useful to have the camera do it automatically, so that I can properly frame the shot as I take it. If I set the picture to 8 megapixels, it would give me the equivalent focal length of about 750mm. If I set the picture 3 megapixels, it would give me roughly 1,170mm equivalent focal length. Given most of my pictures are web only, and I only print the occasional 8x10 calendar or 4x6 photo, I don't really need the extra megapixels.

Another factor is the FZ-300 and the Fuji S1 are just about the only super zoom cameras that are splash proof. As somebody who seems to get a lot of vacation days with some amount of rain, I appreciate cameras that I don't have to carry a plastic bag to protect the little dear from getting wet. My E-m1/G85 laugh in the face of rain, and now the FZ-300 will join them.

One thing that initially drew me to the Nikon B-500 was it used AA batteries, while the B-700 and P-900 used yet another battery type. I have plenty of rechargeable AA batteries from my flashes, and from previous use of my C-2100UZ and SP-550UZ cameras. The FZ-300 uses the same batteries that my G85 uses. While it is a minor thing, I find having several different cameras, each with different batteries means I have to have a collection of batteries and chargers for my trip.

Another thing that I started thinking of is I'm used to the Olympus color signature and method of doing things, and in the last year and a quarter, I've been adapting to the Panasonic signature and method as well. I would prefer not having to learn the Nikon, Canon, or Fuji method as well.

One other thing for extreme zoom, is you can attach a teleconverter to the FZ300. I have a Tcon-17 from many years ago. I ordered a cheap DMW-LA7 to be able to mount the Tcon. From what I've read, the original Tcon-17 isn't that great on the FZ-300 (it was much better on the previous FZ-200), but I figured it might be useful to play with it.

Though with my last 3 cameras (G-85, LX-10, and now FZ-300) and my last lens (100-300mm mark II) being Panasonic, it does sadden me that Olympus hasn't put out anything recently that would tempt me. I fear that Olympus is getting into a mold where they are only producing high end, high $$$ bodies (E-m1 mark III) or low end bodies that have a lot of the useful features removed (E-m10 mark III), and there seems to be nothing in the middle to tempt people like me that are beyond the beginner camera, but may not have the budget to drop $2k on cameras and $1+k on lenses each year. Sure Panasonic is putting out the high spec bodies (G9, GH5s) and Leica lenses, but they are also putting out more moderate offerings as well. And in the context of this forum, they are still putting out fixed lens bodies in various price points.

 

[KeepCalm]

All the decent super-zooms are going to 1" sensors, I don't see the point of having a 1/2.3" sensor in a body that's as big as a DSLR. I guess Olympus doesn't see the point either.

However, there are no 1" sensor super-zoom cameras.

These guys must have got the specs wrong: http://www.techradar.com/news/photography-video-capture/cameras/best-bridge-camera-1259503

Well they do not include the canon G3X in the list and if you look at the Cons in their review apart from no panorama and no 4K, which does not prevent inclusion of the SX60, is that it is not pocket friendly. You have to wonder how much understanding of the specs they have if they imagine the fact that a weather sealed 1" sensor 24-600mm equivalent lens camera cannot be put in a pocket is a product fault.

as well as these guys: https://www.dpreview.com/products/sony/compacts/sony_dscrx10iv/specifications .

--
Thoughts, Musings, Ideas and Images from South Gippsland
https://australianimage.com.au