In an ideal world one camera can do every challenging job, fits in every pocket and lives forever on a battery. I really tried to find the ideal cam and the best one (a compact superzoom) get very far, including manual options, good movies and crystal clear stereo sound recordings. But it only fits in a very big pocket and there’s more it’s just not able to.

First of all there’s noise: a compact camera gives speckled images under less than ideal light circumstances. Like a family portrait late in the afternoon and a short shutter time to prevent movement: than you have the raise the ISO value and… get noise!

Another thing is focussing: especially superzooms can have a lot of trouble to get a good focus on low contrast objects, even with an auto focus help light. Of course there is a manual focus option, but it’s rather difficult to get good results.

Almost no modern compact camera can write RAW images. That’s a format, giving you so much more options later for processing the image. I thought I did not need that, until I wanted to shoot some series on paintings. Especially when you cannot control the lighting (like in a museum) it’s almost impossible to get the colors exactly on the image as they are on the original. Modern camera’s really do a good job, but sometimes it’s not good enough - and than it’s a human who needs to give the finishing touch. Editing a compressed image is too limited…

And finally, it can be annoying when adding lenses does not increase overall quality. A macro add-on lens can be great, but a teleconverter is often disappointing. Digiscoping is a very good option, but can only be done with a 3x zoomlens on the camera (4x at most). How nice it would be to change a lens entirely!

So yes, I’m still very happy with my compacts, but I do need something else… a Single Lens Reflex (SRL) it will be, not fitting in my pocket either… but able to do anything a compact can’t!