Perfect Travel Camera

As a professional photographer, I care a lot about the quality of my photographs. Because of that obsession I have always lugged heavy bags laden with SLRs, lenses, flashes and other accessories on my trips and vacations.
A few months ago my wife and I went on a short vacation to New England. After hours of hiking with a backpack on my back and two SLRs (a Canon 20D with a 70-200 f/4 L lens and a 40D with a 17-40 L lens) my back was killing me to the point where I was sorely tempted to leave everything under a tree and hike back to the car. Granted, lugging all that equipment paid off and I brought back some really wonderful and memorable photographs. On the other hand, my vacation turned into just another working weekend and my enjoyment from the trip was greatly diminished by all the extra weight on my back and shoulders.
Once I came back to Pittsburgh, I swore that never again will I lug 30 pounds of photo equipment on a vacation. Thus, my search for the perfect travel camera had began.
I spent hours on dpreview.com and photographyreview.com reading people’s opinions of various advanced point-and-shoot cameras. I emailed every professional photographer that I know and asked them what camera’s they take on their vacations.
Several of my photographer friends swore by Leica M8 as the perfect travel camera, but the $5000 price tag is a bit too taxing for my wallet. So, after much deliberation, I picked up two cameras – a Canon Powershot S5 IS and a Canon Powershot G9.
At first, I was totally in love with the G9 – it’s size and weight were perfect for travel and the retro styling of the body just looked cool. The fact that it could shoot RAW was also a big plus. However, after playing with it for a couple of days I became very disappointed with the images. At low ISO the images were wonderful, very much on par with my SLRs and Canon L-series lenses. Alas, if I set the ISO to 400 or higher, the images became so noisy that they were virtually unusable. I thought that maybe I got stuck with a defective camera, but as it turned out many photographers complained of the same problem. With a heavy heart I put the camera back into it’s original box and took it back to the store.
I don’t know what possessed Canon to stuff 12 megapixels into G9’s tiny sensor. If they stuck with 8 megapixels of G7, G9’s predecessor, it would have been so much easier to control the noise at high ISOs.
Canon Powershot S5 ended up being a keeper, although it’s nothing to write home about. The image quality is very decent, but far from stellar. The super-zoom lens is nice as an all-around travel lens, but there is a considerable amount of purple fringing at the telephoto end. Also, the images are very soft past 200mm.
The fact that the S5 is powered by AA batteries is also a big drawback. Regular AA don’t last very long – maybe about 50 shots. Rechargeable metal nickel hydrate batteries last for about 100-150 shots, but considering the fact that I shoot 500-1500 images on an average travel day, I have to go through at least 4 sets of batteries that have to be recharged afterwards. Why Canon decided not to use a high-capacity battery with the S5 is beyond my understanding.
If anyone from Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Fuji, or any other camera manufacturing company comes across this post, please, I beg you, make the perfect travel camera. These are the features that I would love to see:
1. Small and light – the size of Canon Powershot S5 is perfect
2. A slightly larger sensor than 1/1.8 or 1/2.5
3. Don’t pack it with megapixels – 8 megapixels is sufficient for a travel camera
4. Image stabilization
5. Usable ISO 800
6. Faster lens – I don’t care about super-zoom, just give me a high-quality lens that would cover a 35mm equivalent of 24-105 mm
Canon, if you can add these features to what’s already packed into the S5, I’ll be forever in your debt.