Buying a travel camera, or any camera

Which cameras do you buy? There are some principles that should help make the decision very easy. 

Don't miss that family photo

A camera must have two qualities. Always on you and the speed, you can get it out and use. One of those issues will be the sped of autofocus. A photo that is 80% is better than no photo at all. Seeking perfection is the wrong approach. The question is here is how much weight do you want to carry as well. 

Do you want to shoot in poor light? At night time?

If that is a yes then your budget is going to have to treble. This is where the £££ cost is without going into too much technical detail. Now of course mid-range cameras are getting better and better and so too are camera phones. 

How often will you get out a heavy tripod, spend 20 minutes setting up the perfect photo, and then pixel peep after?

This sort of behavior is for the camera nerds or those wanting a front-page feature shot in difficult or exceptional circumstances. Such as poor light, poor contrast, or wider or telescopic angles. 

Travel

My cameras are mainly for travel. I backpack so weight is everything. I've broken more straps due to the excessive weight of all my gear and clothes and will often find myself travelling fully loaded from Night at A to a night at Hotel B somewhere else but with several destinations to stop off at throughout the day. 

Zoom and weight are important. The secondary considertation is low light. I have my phone of course and I reckon I shoot 40% of all photos on it. The button on an iphone is rubbish so I use a cheap bluetooth clicker in my other hand. Either that or I have my cheap pocket zoom and use that, especially for zoom shots. 

Advanced features?

Are you really going to use them? Camera RAW is not much better than jpeg to the naked eye and is back to pixel peeping. Most photos are about snatching and capturing a memory and increasingly downsized and shared via social media. 

The best all-round camera on the market by far.

The best camera by far is your phone camera. Always with you. Beautiful colours. Mid-range and higher when it comes or low or poor light and for video can shoot 60fps at 4k. Camera phones are now able to match mid-ranger and higher cameras in most circumstances. Where they are poor is wide-angle, telescopic zoom. 

Telescopic zoom is important. Your child may be some way away at an event and you want to capture the details. However, many lower-end cameras have superzoom and take great photos with good daylight conditions. They only fall over when the light deteriorates.

With apps, they are evolving higher-end features such as manual controls and can be mounted on a cheaper lighter tripod. Where they will overtake cameras is on videos with gimbal control. which are anti-shake handles with a cradle that the phone sits in. Of course, cameras can sit in the cradle as well but what a faff to do so. If you want to shoot the moon or the milky way and need every advanced feature and a telescopic lens then you will need to spend £5,000 on top-of-the-range gear. 

What do I use? 

I finally splashed out on a Sony A7r iii and lens. Expedition gear that takes up enormous space and weight and not what I would backpack with. I have a super wide-angle lens and a super zoom including for low light. 

I use a bottom end of the market Sony DX9 pocket super4zoom for travel. I still have a Sony 6300 which is larger than pocket camera but still smallish with a small 24-50mm lens and importantly shoots great in low light and too a bigger picture size. I sometimes take that instead but 50mm zoom is weak compared to the 240mm zoom on the DX9.

And you got the quick photo thanks but it's poor. 

If it is poor light that is the problem I use Adobe Lightroom to correct it. If it is shaky I use Photoshop's Camera Shake filter. If it is low light bets two options are Imagenomics anti blotch or blur add on filter to Photoshop or Topax Gigapixel AI which blows up photos but does a gear job or ironing our problems.