EVERY modern digital camera offers roughly the same features: zoom lens, movie mode, output jack for displaying photos on a TV, rapid-fire burst mode and so on. The camera makers pondered: if every camera is essentially alike, what’s left to attract buyers? Specialisation, baby. Adapt or die.THE UNDERWATER CAMERA You can buy a waterproof housing for many cameras — if you don’t mind hauling a Jacques Cousteau contraption to the beach. Olympus and Pentax offer better solutions: tiny, silver, swimsuit-pocketable cameras that are waterproof to a depth of 10 ft without requiring any external encumbrances. Suddenly, previously unphotographable realms of life can now become part of your memory stash: water parks, beaches, backyard hose fights, rainy baseball games and on and on. These features don’t come without trade-offs. Pentax’s Optio W10 (6 megapixels) and the Olympus Stylus 720 SW (7.1 MP) lack optical viewfinders, which may disappoint people who find it awkward to compose shots using the screen. Worse, neither camera has an autofocus assist lamp, an essential feature for crisp focus in dim light. Both cameras take beautiful underwater pictures. Once you emerge from the deep, though, it can be hard to dry the lens if all you’ve got is wet fingers. And indoor shots on the Pentax too often displayed the purplish fog and blur of camera phones.THE SEE-IN-THE-DARK CAM Life is filled with beautiful scenes bathed in natural light—but most cameras muff the job either by blurring the shot (because the shutter must remain open a long time) or by nuking the whole affair with a flash. Not the Fujifilm FinePix F30 (6.1 MP). This camera’s sensor is eight times as light-sensitive as most pocket cams. To put it in geek terms, its ISO range goes to 3200—a first for a consumer camera. You can turn off the flash and still get amazingly clear, colorful, well-lighted shots, even at twilight, by firelight or indoors. At the highest ISO settings, a few digital colored speckles creep in, but only on shots you’d otherwise have missed. T HE MOVIE CAM Canon’s remarkable PowerShot S3 IS (6 MP) has two shutter buttons. One starts recording video; the other snaps a still. You can use either button at any time. For example, you can start recording video even in still-photo mode—and you can snap full-resolution stills even during filming. (Each still interrupts the video with a frame of blackness and a shutter-snap sound, however.) This camera makes it possible for just one parent to capture both video and stills of that piano recital or curtain call. As a bonus, the S3 IS offers a massive 12X optical zoom—with image stabilisation, thank you very much. Both the zoom and the stabilisation work while you’re shooting movies, a rarity indeed. THE HDTV CAM Almost any old camera can display on TV the photos you’ve just taken—a hit at any party. Too bad you’re seeing only a fraction of their quality; the standard TV screen shows only 640 by 480 pixels. Samsung’s Digimax L8 (8.1 MP) is a fine if sluggish camera that handily solves that problem: it connects to the HDMI jack of a high-definition television. When your subjects see themselves in such astonishing clarity and detail on your 42-inch plasma, they’ll either be blown away or make dermatologist appointments.THE BLUETOOTH CAM Even the Panasonic isn’t the world’s smallest 10X camera; that honour goes to the handsome black slab called the Kodak EasyShare V610. This camera packs two internal zoom lenses: one that zooms up to 3X, another that takes you from there to 10X. Unfortunately, the handoff between lenses isn’t seamless when you’re zooming in or out. Each time you hit the 3X point, zooming stops. You have to press the zoom button a second time to force a switch to the other lens. But the V610 has another trick up its sleeve: it can also send your photos to a cellphone or a laptop using a wireless Bluetooth transmitter. It’s a great way to share the Kodak’s pictures with buddies on the spot and without a computer.THE BOTTOM LINE Some of these mutant cameras excel in one freakish area, but otherwise disappoint. A few, though, are more well-rounded. Cameras like the Canon S3 IS, Fujifilm F30 and the Panasonic TZ1 place the emphasis where it should remain: on outstanding picture quality. These cameras may be mutants, but they’re clearly superhero material. (DAVID POGUE)
