Ryan Brenizer — NYC Wedding Photographer. Problem solver, storyteller.

The compact world is in a bit of a stir right now. Heck, all you need to do is read the news today, with Canon’s release of a compact camera with a DSLR-sized sensor. After years and years of advanced amateurs and professionals saying “Wake, up guys! The compact cameras are uninspired and terrible — you need to shake it up!” the companies are finally listening. Why?

Phones.

Simply put, there is no reason for anyone to buy a bad digital compact again. They’re already carrying something around in their pocket that does the job of a bad digital camera — and some of them, like the iPhone 4s or Samsung Galaxy SII, can play the part of a pretty decent compact. The entire lower end of that market is in deep, deep trouble, and they know it. So what they’re finally starting to focus on are compacts that can do things your phones can’t. Use flash well. Shoot in lower light. Shoot RAW. And in Nikon’s case, use interchangeable lenses.

Nikon and Fuji are showing two different approaches to this market, with Nikon heavily touting their new J1 and V1 lines, with a bigger-than-compact-but-still-small sensor that allows for a smaller system overall. Fuji had a hit with the X100, and they’re hoping to replicate it on a smaller scale with the compact, zooming X10.

Now, as a professional Nikon user, my initial gut reaction to the J1 was disappointment. I know from the X100 that mirrorless options can be helpful in even the most professional systems, and I was hoping for something that would change my working environment. The J1 isn’t designed for work — it’s for fun. It’s about being a compact camera with somewhat better photos and having the versatility of interchangeable lenses. And then something got my attention — people who used it, other people who had been disappointed, started singing its praises. That little-but-not-too-little sensor seemed to be quite a workhorse. So I got my hands on one to pair with the X10 I was testing and headed out to Hong Kong.

I put up some preview images yesterday, and everyone assumed I was testing the Canon 1DX versus Nikon D4. It wasn’t my intention to trick anyone — I want to really put the D4 through its paces before I write a review, but I suppose that speaks well for these cameras.

The X10 is the simpler camera to describe: it’s just a compact, but a nice one. It has a nice zoom range from medium wide-angle to short telephoto (“portrait length”), and you zoom manually by turning the ring, not from moving some wonky switch like most compacts. It zooms smoothly as you turn, more smoothly than cameras like the Canon S100 that try the same trick. Its zoom range also starts at a nice and fast f/2 and only closes down to f/2.8 at the long end. It has an optical viewfinder, but it’s of the only-for-emergencies compact camera style, not anything like its big brother the X100.

Essentially, the X10 changes nothing radical about the idea of what a compact camera is, but they bring impeccable style and functionality to the design — and that makes all the difference. It’s a pleasure to use in a way that was almost unthinkable for a compact from about 2002-2009. In true Fuji style is produces nice, colorful images with good skin tones, and a noticeable love for magenta:

One thing to note about the X10: Like a good number of compacts these days, it cheats even with its RAW files, writing in instructions to clean up extreme barrel distortion and vignetting. Companies like Panasonic have done this a lot, and it’s dramatic to see what happens when you open the same files in a program that listens to those instructions (such as Adobe Lightroom) versus one that doesn’t (like Apple’s Aperture.) Here is the same photo from Lightroom on the left and Aperture on the right — no adjustments:

You can see Lightroom left in a little bit of the distortion to not change the frame too radically, but especially with this sort of composition the one on the right (which reflects how the lens actually captures the scene) looks almost like it was taken with a fisheye.

But it’s a good camera overall, and great at low-light for a compact. Here’s an ISO 1600 image — a bit painterly noise reduction in places, but still sharp and with good detail:

The J1 confirmed a good number of my worst feelings when I first picked it up — this is made for consumers, not a tool for professionals to use on the side. All you need to know is that Nikon, the Kings of Strobism, didn’t put a hot shoe on it. They clearly put thought into making this just something to capture snapshots and home video better than a phone can. And so the video side is well-thought-out, with a separate button for video capture and a slow-motion mode that really works, although it has low resolution and a long aspect ratio.

On the face, it seems to not quite realize the advantages of the small sensor. The camera is small but not THAT small — the APS-C-sensored NEX-5n is smaller. The optics are still just as slow as they’d be on a bigger DSLR — the kit lens I used was f/3.5-5.6. When you compare that to the f/2 to f/2.8 lens the Fuji had, suddenly you seem to be giving up the gains that the bigger sensor gives you.

But then I started seeing the images. And they looked good. Crisp and clear and with vibrant but realistic color — better than what I’d gotten from a compact before, even a well-designed one like the X10. High ISO is surprisingly good. Good enough that although I wanted to use these cameras for their intended market of vacation snapshots, I even used it for clients — the image at top is ISO 800, which was enough to capture a night-time scene with very little noise and sharpness and detail preserved. In that case, the design came in handy, since I wanted the “infinite depth-of-field” look that I would have had to stop WAY down on my D3s to get.

Here’s a few more images showing that it’s crisp and sharp and handles contrast well:

Perhaps Nikon is reaping the advantage of low expectations, since the camera is more enjoyable to use than it appears on paper. I think the full promise of this system will come with the adapters, where the 2.7x crop will turn telephoto lenses into “photograph a songbird’s eyeball” lenses. But something like a 20mm f/2 would be a nice addition to the lens line-up, as even amateurs expect nice results in terrible light these days.

Since these are similar price (with the J1′s kit lens), this is going to come down to personal preference, especially given all of the other compeition for this marketplace. But it’s heartening to see how many more great choices we have now than the dark ages of compact camera design.