cowfish

Last week (yes, this is a little late but I am a) busy and b) lazy) I was invited along to my first press conference – a nice PR company had recognised the excellence of my mastery of the photographic art (ie. found me by accident on flickr) and invited me and some of the other cognoscenti of the London flickr scene (including mondoagogo and Ghene) along to see and play with a new line of cameras produced by GE, who are making an attempt to break into the rather lucrative digicam market. Cyniscism aside, it was on the top of the Oxo tower and they fed me a rather tasty breakfast, so I feel slightly in debt to them, hence a write up.

I played with a couple of the cameras and found them all to be much of a muchness, the exception being the bottom of the range G2, which is part of the super-thin, credit card-like camera group and was totally missed by me until I was on my way out. Build quality is quite solid, with a good mix of metal and plastic, although they all felt just a little too light. While this at first may sound like a good thing, it gave an overall impression of cheapness and also led to some difficulty with holding the camera steady when pressing the shutter. Control layout was fairly standard, with whirly mode selector dial and four way rocker switch for flash, timer, exposure compensation and macro selection. The menu layout was fairly clear with a good chunk of options for the brave to tinker with, but it also left the main and important functions to off menu controls, which allowed easy switching of modes and selection of settings. Which was nice.

The technical specs of the cameras naturally vary through the range, going from a 7 to 12 megapixels with some of the higher models sporting an f/2.8 capable lens, an HDMI out connection and controlless back/touch screen combo. There was also talk of a “soon to be ready” model featuring built in GPS for automatic geotagging. Mainly the features that were above and beyond the current standard of compact digital cameras felt slightly gimmicky, as maybe a way to distinguish these new models from the current slew of similarly specced cameras on the market. However, the two features that felt most like this were the blink and smile detection. They were mentioned briefly during the main presentation and I spoke with the on-site techy guy for some more of an explanation about how they worked: simply put, blink detection tells you if someone blinked in your photo and smile detection automatically triggers the shutter when the subject of your photo smiles. In practise these both felt rather useless, with the blink detection informing you of something that you can normally tell by looking at a photo after you’ve shot it – something you have to do in order to see the “Blink detected” message, and the smile detection not working reliably, with both huge cheesey grins and frowns being ignored and detected seemingly at random. Nice idea and a good way to pick up a few fence sitters, but not something that I can ever really see being used in anger.

It was not all bad though, with some of the features coming out quite strongly. Firstly the seemingly ever present image stabilisation, here appearing in all models, rather than just towards the top of the range, and working rather well, allowing crisp shots at lower shutter speeds than I would expect.

Secondly is the macro mode, which is the way that I managed to get the best looking images out of the camera.

Good flash coverage, nice detail and good close focus. Quite impressive for a fairly dinky camera

Thirdly comes the in-camera auto-stitching panorama mode. Fairly standard implementation, with a transparent section of the previous photo being shown on the right hand side of the screen allowing you to roughly line up the next shot. However the in camera blending seemed to be a good bit better than other similar systems.

Noticeable distortion due to the wide angle of shot and some brightness issues at the joins, but some good stitching.

Much better stitching here and not bad for a quick low light shot.

Not great, but better than any in camera one that I have seen so far.

I don’t shoot much with compacts these days, apart from the occasional bit of gig photography, as venues are quite strict on the stopping of “professional” photo gear at the door. As such, my main points of interest on these cameras were shutter lag and high ISO performance. On the first point I didn’t have much of an issue, with the shutter firing off quite quickly after a press of the button, although occasionally the autofocus did spend a while hunting – especially when very zoomed in, where I switched cameras to make sure that the slow grinding whirr of the lens moving wasn’t due to a low battery. However at ISO1600 the E840s really did not impress.

Noisy enough that neatimage didn’t stand a chance.

This may be towards the bottom of their range, but the specs happily boast that all the cameras have “High ISO sensitivity”, which may well be true but doesn’t guarantee a usable picture. Ghene has a more in depth comparison of the various ISOs at the end of her article.

Overall they turned out to be a fairly mixed bag. Some fairly interesting sounding features that turned out to be not as interesting as they at first seemed, and some run of mill features that worked rather well. The designers seem to be fairly clued up, with the inclusion of automatic geotagging in future models and fairly extensive EXIF tagging in the current ones, all working to currently accepted standards allowing sites like flickr to autopopulate a lot of their metadata (including a description of “Ge digital camera” appearing on each of the photos I uploaded to flickr). In summary I’d say these were fairly solid compact digicams with a bunch of easily ignorable features with some issues at higher ISOs. As long as they keep the prices down (mondoagogo and Ghene cornered the commercial director and heard that they should vary from

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