I’ve Been on the look out for a better camera to replace my Olympus TG-3 with it’s small sensor and in confession, rather frustratingly excessively heavy noise reduction (that you can’t disable)… something that is weather proof, can fit in my pocket, has a 1 inch sensor, acceptable low light performance, and has zoom.

After much searching, the conclusion that I’ve come to is that in the digital compact point and shoot camera market has almost completely stalled. Neither Olympus, Sony, Panasonic haven’t updated their Waterproof Camera line for something like 2-3 years, with the actual hardware itself hardly having shifted for the last perhaps five years (later models it seems simply predominantly had firmware updates and then sold as a new camera)

It appears Smart phones are eating up the space that was formerly occupied by compact point and shoot cameras.  The problem this presents is that the middle ground between commoners who simply take photos for social media and more professional consumers is sorely uncatered for.

• Phone Cameras I feel are still lacking in the image quality department, while the likes of Samsung have done quite well, the others haven’t done so well. Additionally, They still lack optical zoom.
• I’ve tried lugging around a DSLR, it just doesn’t work (for me), the case is too large and is always bouncing around against my body.
• At the same time, the water proof compacts (the segment I’m looking at) seem to still be bundled with small sensors (unchanged from 5 years ago), rather over aggressive noise reduction you can’t turn off, and pictures that look all smudge except in the brightest of sunny days… Zoom in to this example here – and you will see what I mean

At the moment, In the absence of anything more suited to my present situation, will retain the TG-3, however, the camera is now well over 2 years old, has taken the best part of perhaps 30,000 snaps, and is already faulting out (Unable to Focus until power cycled / Crashes) on an increasingly regular basis, so am keen to find a possible replacement soon before it finally gives up the ghost completely.