The perfect miniature travel camera?

I purchased one of these in Singapore on my last visit and promptly fell in love with it.

I’ve got a Nikon D-70 and F-90x, which are great cameras – superb image quality, fantastic lenses and so on: but my camera bag weighs about 35 pounds and is a full backpack. Not practical if you are travelling, so I bought a Stylus-S and a 512Mb high-speed xD card as a travel camera that is only slightly bigger than my cell-phone.

I’ve used it for still and video, sound recording included, and it’s hard to fault the performance at the size. Stills are sharp, the optical zoom gives no noticeable barrel or pincushion, colour values are good, it appears to be very robust (yes, I’ve dropped it) and it looks absurdly cool (never thought I’d say that about a camera).

The interface is very good and should be a model of how to design a UI for people who don’t read the manual before they switch it on. The menus make sense and you can see them on the generous rear screen.

I also “handles” – it’s easy to get a good image composition as it feels right – I have had serious ergonomic problems with much higher featured compacts because they a simply so much more finicky and awkward to use.

Flash is a bit weenie, but then look at the size of the camera! It copes well with long, hand-held exposures without apparent reciprocity failure and a suitable tripod is about the size of a couple of short pencils.

The MPEG video is a bit chunky, but what do you expect from a still camera of this size and relatively economical price. Two years ago 5 mega pixels was the province of seriously high-end digital SLRs and the occasional steroidal compact.

A camera of this size must necessarily have some design compromises (like flash power or ultimate battery life), but in this case they have been in the areas that do not affect the camera’s usability or capability.