The EOS 300D Vs Compacts And Bridge Cameras

Although the Canon EOS 300D's trump card is the price, though comparison with top-of-the-range compacts and bridge cameras is not unreasonable. After all, many enthusiastic amateurs or "prosumers," and even professionals, will opt for a high-end compact, for want of something better. Clearly, at a cost of $500-$800 (600-800 euros) for the finest compacts with a resolution of 5 megapixels), the true enthusiast would not hesitate to spend a little more and buy a Canon. This the advent of the EOS 300D is entering new territory, that of equivalence to the film camera. To summarize: Hitherto, a compact camera could cost the same price as a good SLR film camera.

So everything's changing, and this could well give the compact camera market a new lease of life. Now that compacts are more and more affordable, the traditional gulf between the cost of compact film cameras and compact SLR cameras is being reproduced in the digital field. Some professionals adore the principle of the compact for a variety of reasons, from its compactness (obviously!) to its lightweight, via the unobtrusiveness of the equipment. Obviously, such cameras can play the role of "back-up" for a whole range of photographic applications. In short, whether amateur or professional, photographers have something to please all of them and the market is re-centering.

The bridge camera is in a more difficult position. Although it's easy to trace a very sharp division between the compact and the reflex camera, with their various advantages and disadvantages (of which an exhaustive list would go on forever), the demarcation line between the bridge camera and the reflex camera is much harder to specify. Traditional bridge cameras were designed as an alternative for "amateurs" to the heavy, cumbersome SLR cameras. With the advent of digital photography, the bridge camera gained a new lease of life by offering technical features that were identical for a much lower cost. Yet, although certain amateurs were won over by this range of cameras, many professional and amateur photographers were put off by the "almost" aspect of the product. A few ventured to try it, forced into it by the fact that the SLR digital market was so small at the time.

Yet the bridge camera has by no means breathed its last in the field of "professional" photography. With its compactness and versatile zoom lenses (often equivalent to 28-200 mm), they have certain advantages. The prices are still too high, unfortunately, especially when compared with the EOS 300D (take the CF Dimage A1, which sells at or $1200 or 1,400 euros. The Sony DSC-F828 remains, for the moment, the sole serious competitor, thanks to its record high resolution of 8 million pixels and a design similar to that of an SLR (with manually adjustable zoom rings and direct focusing through the barrel of the lens). It would thus be interesting to compare the F828 and the 300D.