"Rich" wrote in message
ps.com...
Terrible, terrible. You see where ultrazooms have taken formerly
acceptable flagship P&Ss? Old 3-5x zoomed P&S's with 2/3" sensors
were 10x better than this horror. Imagine if they had stuck with
them, and kept improving the processing?

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/pana...Z18/page14.asp



It's impossible not to agree with you - those images are simply awful. I
used to have an E20, which compared to those was a Leica.

I still can't understand why cameras like the Olympus 8080 (which was
supposed to have excellent image quality) were dropped in favour of these
new cams..How can it be 'consumer demand'? - those who are knowledgeable
would urge against small sensors crammed with more pixels, and those who
don't know/don't care are hardly likely to have expressed any sort of
preference one way or the other.

So the decision to market these things must be squarely down to the camera
companies themselves - one can perhaps understand why gadget makers like
Casio would produce 'feature packed' (but ultimately useless) novelty
cameras, but why did the 'real' camera manufacturing companies join in this
foolishness? How can optical specialists like Olympus and Pentax churn
these things out and not be ashamed?