Zoom!

The price of cameras and lenses can seem outrageously high, camera bodies especially, which are mass-produced electronic items with very few mechanical moving parts these days. That a new camera body aimed primarily at hobbyists can approach £1.5K and still be described as "affordable" is just silly; insulting, even. So, despite my enthusiasm and a reasonably healthy bank balance, I usually buy my gear second-hand, and prefer to use bottom-of-the-line lenses such as kit zooms, together with cheap third-party accessories like lens hoods, grips, and so on. Admittedly, buyers of used kit depend on someone else somewhere having paid full price, but the same is true for cars and even books (except photo-books, which invariably seem to increase in value...). The fact is that I am instinctively tight-fisted, the sort of person who is still wearing shirts bought a decade or more ago (as I realised recently); but then that is why my bank balance remains healthy.

However, I do have a fascination with the more unusual byways of photography – the weirder and less-travelled the better – and, like anyone with a bit of cash to spare, I enjoy treating myself now and then. Being an incorrigible cheapskate, though, I mainly keep an eye out for items "on sale" online and browse the used-equipment sites to see which of yesterday's intriguing novelties are now being sold off at knock-down prices: my various experiments with the Light L16 "computational" camera were a typical bargain-basement adventure. So when it came to pass, back in October, that the Canon Powershot Zoom – a clearly absurd device (reviewed by a sensible person here) that had nonetheless intrigued me ever since it was announced in 2020 – could now be had at some outlets for under £200, I made my move. Well, OK! Here, take my money.

Actually, "absurd" is unfair. The concept of a digital, image-stabilised, step-zoom monocular combined with a camera able to record whatever you happened to point the thing at is actually a really great idea. Sadly, Canon either lost their nerve ("Wait, who the hell is actually going to buy this thing? Cut the specs!") or gave the design brief to an idiot. Whatever, the result looks like a timid toe-in-the-water compromise, and something no serious photographer or nature enthusiast was ever likely to buy. Optical focal lengths of 100mm and 400mm sound impressive (and are, in camera terms) but in binocular terms 400mm is only equivalent to "eight times" magnification, no better than your bog-standard birder's 8x30 bins [1]. The third zoom setting of 800mm is seriously impressive in camera terms (ever seen an 800mm lens?), but sadly is merely a digital crop of the 400mm lens. And the camera... Well, we'll get to that.

I'm not going to describe and review the thing, other than to mention its two obvious advantages: its size and its weight. The Powershot Zoom weighs just 145g, and fits comfortably in the palm of one hand, like a sleek pocket torch. Even the very smallest micro 4/3 camera – the truly tiny Panasonic GM1 – fitted with a 45-200mm lens (equivalent to 90-400mm in 35mm camera focal lengths) weighs 565g and is a cumbersome object, especially when zoomed out to its fullest extent. Here you go:

Little camera, meet Wooz!

Crazy!

Now, if the Zoom had a superb viewfinder and could record excellent pictures, it would be a wonderful thing to keep permanently in a coat pocket, wouldn't it? After all, it's not as if Canon don't know how to make a superb camera. But frustratingly it doesn't, and it can't: at best, in the absence of binoculars it's quite handy for deciding whether those are sheep or goats in that field on the other side of the valley. But, frankly, my first impression of the Zoom's photographs (12MP JPEGs) was: huh? WTF! And my second impression merely added another exclamation mark. These were quite possibly the worst digital photographs I had ever seen; hilariously bad, like something out of a toy camera.

"Out of the camera" JPEG...

Admittedly taken through the double-glazed window of our Bristol flat...

 But... They had something... And the thing is so convenient... And I have always really enjoyed the isolating effect of a long telephoto lens, but could never be bothered to tote one around on a just in case basis. Long-lens photography is never spontaneous, so something like this could and should have been a bit of a game-changer. So I began mucking about in Photoshop to see if the photos could be rescued, perhaps with a more graphical look in mind, and – behold! – some much better images started to emerge from the fog:

That's a bit more like it... In fact, after fiddling about with a few more, I realised that there was hidden potential in these pictures: with the application of various Secret Sauces and printed on an A4 sheet they look great. Of course, no pixel-peeping photo-enthusiast who lugs around a proper grown-up's camera and is possessed by an urge to print REALLY BIG would ever be happy with these, but a picture-maker with a taste for small prints (that would be me) might just have stumbled across something quite handy. Plus I really don't think anyone would imagine that shot of the far side of the Avon Gorge had been taken with a pocketable gizmo the size and weight of a bar of soap, and from a distance of 325 meters through a double-glazed window.

And who would ever imagine that a truly dreadful JPEG file like this:

might be hiding something rather more beautiful behind that drab and fuzzy facade:

Hey presto! It's magic!

Obviously, just as with stage magic, a certain amount of well-practised sleight of hand is required to deliver a convincingly polished performance. And, yes, such prestidigitation can be a lot of work, and not every shot can be rescued, but it is well worth the effort, I think, if only because this has opened up a whole new field of interest for me and, best of all, I'm having a lot of fun with my new bargain-basement toy, which has turned out, against all expectation, to be something of a pocket rocket.

1. These are "35mm equivalent" focal lengths, of course. To get the binocular magnification equivalent of a 35mm lens, the convention is to divide the lens focal length by 50 (a 50mm lens is assumed to be equivalent to "1x" magnification). Thus the equivalent to a "ten times" binocular magnification is a 500mm lens, which is why a decent pair of compact 10x25 binoculars are (is?) such a Good Thing to have hanging round your neck, whereas a camera mounted with a 500mm lens is not.