In this post I
will describe my previous digital cameras.
I bought my first digital camera in 2003. It was a 4
MP Canon Powershot S40 compact
camera.
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| Canon S40 |
It was the start of the digital camera era and digital amateur SLR or interchangeable
lens cameras as we know them now a days didn’t exist. Digital photography was new
and many people held on to analog cameras, which they considered to have a
better image quality. Imagine that this is only about 10 years ago!
A few years later the first digital SLR cameras for
amateur were introduced. So I bought a 8 MP Canon 350d digital SLR. I shot quite a few photos with my 350d, but
in one way or another I never liked this camera very much.
 |
| Canon 350d |
I wanted to have a more compact camera, which I could
carry in my pocket always, so in 2008 I bought a 10 MP Casio Exlim EZ Z-1080, one of the smallest point and shoot compact
cameras at that time. I could take it with me all te time and as long as the
light wasn’t too bad, the pictures were of a reasonable quality.
 |
| Casio EZ Z-1080 |
I must admit
that judging quality in those days was compared to a previous camera and with
development of cameras going very fast at that time any new camera was better than your previous model a few years old.
In 2010 I went on a vacation to South Africa and I
wanted something more than just a simple point and shoot camera. So I bought a 12
MP Panasonic FZ38 camera.
 |
| Panasonic FZ38 |
This was
what they call a bridge camera which had a lot of more possibilities. You
couldn’t change lenses, but it had an 18 times optical zoom and you could choose
an fully automatic program, but also aperture or shutter speed control. So a lot of
features in a compact system and to be honest I made great pictures with it.
My next step in 2011 was a 18 MP Panasonic TZ40. This was a compact camera, with almost the same
features as the FZ38 and some even better, but only half the size.
 |
| Panasonic TZ40 |
You know
what they say: size matters, but for me on a camera this means as small as
possible. I used it for about a year and shot a lot of pictures, but after a
while it had dust on the sensor. So brought it back to the shop to repair, but
after two or three repairs it always had different problems.
It was in October 2012 when I was in a camera store
for returning my TZ40 problem camera that I saw a book about mirrorless
interchangeable lens cameras. I figured out that this was the solution to my
needs, a relative compact system with good photo quality and the possibility to
change lenses. I bought the book and began reading and became more and more
enthusiast about this concept.
Read more in my next post about how I came to my
current camera.
