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Best premium zoom compacts
Once upon a time, when you bought a camera, you had a fairly straightforward choice. You could get a compact camera that was easy to carry around, but which used a small sensor that meant image quality wasn’t great. Or, for a real step up in quality, you could buy a DSLR, but being relatively large and bulky this was probably not a camera you’d carry around all the time.
With the advent of compact system cameras, and in particular ‘rangefinder-style’ models like the Olympus Pen E-P1 in 2009, these lines started to blur – it became possible to get DSLR-level image quality in a rather smaller package. Cameras like the Fujifilm X100 and Ricoh GR also appeared, giving superb quality in a small camera with a fixed prime lens. Then, in mid-2012, Sony released the Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 – a shirt-pocket-sized camera with a 20.2MP, 1in-type sensor with an area almost 3x that of other enthusiast compact cameras – and transformed the market at a stroke. For the first time it became possible to get image quality close to that from a DSLR, in a genuinely small camera with a zoom lens that you could carry everywhere with you.
For a couple of years, Sony had no real competition and, when it announced the third-generation RX100 III in May 2014, it was still essentially unchallenged as the small camera of choice for serious photographers. However, at Photokina later that year, Canon announced the PowerShot G7 X, which was very similar to the RX100 III, and Panasonic entered the fray with the Lumix DMC-LX100, which featured an even larger four thirds-type sensor. Suddenly, the sector looks very competitive indeed.
In this group test we’re looking at these three cameras – the Canon PowerShot G7 X, Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 III and Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX100 – and evaluating their respective strengths and weaknesses. We’re also throwing into the mix the Fujifilm X30, which uses a smaller 2/3in-type sensor, but offers an impressive feature set at a competitive price.
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