Digital SLR versus hybrid cameras

Camera technology used to be quite simple – there were a few different kinds of film, but largely they were very similar: you put a film roll into the camera, wound it on, shut the door and snapped away.

With digital cameras, things are in one sense simpler – there’s no film to worry about and no developing costs either – images are saved on memory cards, which are cheap and store hundreds or thousands of shots.

Types of camera
Camera technology tends to change quite quickly, although cameras have largely remained split into two main groups since the 1970s.

The smaller, cheaper models are known as compact cameras. They are designed for casual snappers, holidaymakers and people who want to take good pictures on a whim.

Single lens reflex (SLR) cameras are their bigger brothers. SLRs have larger lenses, which are usually interchangeable. The lens can be detached from the body and swapped.

One new kind of camera to have appeared since the move to digital photography is the ‘hybrid’ or ‘bridge’ camera that is an attempt to offer the advantages of both SLRs and compacts.

SLR or hybrid?
There are three main advantages of SLRs: first, the interchangeable lenses give users flexibility – if you are shooting portraits a small lens would be ideal, whereas if you wanted to use the same camera for wildlife shots, a long, heavy telephoto lens will be more suitable.

Second, the SLR lenses are larger than those on compact cameras, and the quality of the glass inside them tends to be higher. As much as the number of megapixels, the size and quality of the lens can affect picture quality – a larger lens allows more light into the camera, which is why mobile phone cameras with their tiny lenses tend to produce poor pictures.

Finally, the mechanics of an SLR allow for faster picture taking and more accurate composition. Both are a result of the mirror mechanism inside all SLRs (in fact, the name, Single Lens Reflex, refers to the reflex mechanism of the mirror).

Put simply, the mirror allows the photographer to look through the camera’s viewfinder and see through the lens, so that what you see is what will appear on the photo.

On older compact cameras, the viewfinder was slightly raised above the lens (you’ll see two holes at the front of the camera) which led to what’s called a parallax error, in which what you’d see through the viewfinder was slightly offset from what the lens ‘saw’.

For wide-angle shots it wasn’t a big deal, but for close-up shots the error would be noticeable – faces would be out-of-shot, and so on.

Digital compact cameras solved that by reproducing the image that the lens saw and displaying it on the camera’s rear screen. This led to ‘shutter lag’ in which, after the user presses the button to take a picture, the camera has to switch the screen off and send the image to a different part of the electronics, all of which makes compact cameras slower than SLRs.

So-called hybrid or bridge cameras take the best bits of both compact and SLR devices and blend them into something that sits in-between both types.

Early models, primarily from Fujifilm and Olympus, were a little smaller than an SLR and offered high-quality pictures but were in some cases more expensive than equivalent SLRs.

More recently, Olympus and Panasonic, along with other manufacturers, have developed a new technology called Micro Four Thirds that allows for small camera bodies with interchangeable lenses.

Unlike an SLR there’s no mirror, but shutter lag is kept to a minimum so most users won’t notice it. Cleverly, the lenses are interchangeable between manufacturers (conversely, if you buy a Canon SLR you can’t use Nikon lenses with it).

The pros and cons
The advantages of the hybrid camera are that users can swap lenses, which are bigger than the ones on most compact cameras. More importantly, the shutter lag has been reduced so the speed of taking a picture is comparable to that of an SLR.

Because there’s no mirror assembly, hybrid cameras use an electronic viewfinder – they include rear screens which can be used to compose a picture but also include a small viewfinder hole that the user can look through.

Instead of showing the image through the lens directly (by reflecting incoming light into the user’s eye), such viewfinders are effectively a second screen – the image the user sees is an electronic one. This is a slight disadvantage as it can be slower to respond than a ‘real’ image, and drains the battery.

While early hybrid models were little better than compact cameras in terms of picture quality, the current models have improved vastly – see our review of the Panasonic Lumix GF1 for an example.

However, the big problem is price – if anything, current hybrid models are more expensive than their predecessors, and it’s possible to pick up a decent SLR for less.

Our verdict
Hybrid cameras are an interesting new trend in camera manufacturing. Camera makers have noticed that many people who use compact cameras want more from them but aren’t willing to move up to the bulk of an SLR.

However, they remain too expensive to recommend heartily – the £800 Panasonic model is an impressive camera that’s light and easy to use, but for those interested in photography, the price is offputting. The street price is around £600, but the Nikon D3000 SLR can be bought for £360, while the compact Canon Digital Ixus 120 IS costs under £200.

We expect hybrid cameras to become cheaper as they become more widely available, and as new models come onto the market.

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