I picked up a (melanistic variant) SL300RT* on Thursday evening (T4 Cameras, £350). I'm no digiscoper, but I would certainly recommend it for recording the landscape, flora, and just carrying on the off chance:
The minature camera credo has two parts:
a) Any camera whatsoever - that you have with you - is better than any camera whatsoever - that you left behind.
b) It's up to the camera to give you good A4 pictures when you use all of the frame. It's up to you to make use of all of that frame.
This camera is almost exactly the same size as an audio cassette tape in its case, so you can find out for yourself how easy it is to carry (it is heavier than a cassette tape - it has quite a nice solid feel, for its size). At 2048x1536 pixels and with a Zeiss lens, it is more than capable of producing a good A4 picture. White balance problems are sorted too - this camera has a preset white balance option - point it at a white card and ask it to set the white balance so that it comes out white. Stuffed into the inside cover of my diary I have a rectangle cut from a photgrapher's 50% grey card, so if I take just a little bit of time to set the camera up I can wave goodbye to white balance problems.
The macro mode will focus down to 20cm according to the manual. At A4 print size, this gives you a picture slightly bigger than the original. Not staggering, but I know from experience with 35mm that trying to get closer than this gets complicated pretty quickly - you have to worry a lot more about shading the subject, shake of all sorts, depth of field, and so on.
Minuses - there is no optical viewfinder, and the LCD viewfinder isn't as easy to use in bright light - unless I improve with practice - In fact, I've lost a shot due to that already. I have my doubts about battery life, but it may be OK in practice as long as you don't use flash. At least with Lithium-Ion batteries, you can top them up quickly, and I don't think you have to worry so much about memory effect.
Don't know yet - I need to wait till next June to see if it can take the red poppies in my garden properly, but so far it seems to be handling deep reds OK. My mouse map is a colour chart of all the browser-friendly colours (
www.visibone.com). A picture of this is slightly lacking in contrast, but otherwise very good. I could play with the contrast, but it's close enough and I'd rather be that side of exact faithfullness than the other.
Some pocketable cameras can take being banged around all day, and some can't. I had no problems with a Minolta 16 sub-minature, and an Olympus Pen EE2 half-frame, but I lost two Minox 35mm cameras with the same fault - the front element of the lens came loose, and on one camera eventually dropped off. With a metal body, and the Contax name behind it, I'm hopeful.
I'll give it a try
