The two bad boys of bridge cameras....
I wasn't going to write about gear today but really, I had to. One of my readers wrote me to ask which of the two top bridge cameras I prefer and, for once, I have enough data points on both to answer him. Here's the lay of the land: When it first came out I rushed to buy a Sony RX10 camera, convinced that it might be the "holy grail" of fixed lens cameras. That's a category that's had a soft spot in my heart since the introduction of the Sony R1 about ten years ago. The Sony R1 spoiled me for compact cameras and for other bridge cameras. How could it not? It was the first camera with a nearly APS-C sensor in a fixed lens body whose fixed lens was a crazy good, 24-120mm equivalent Zeiss branded zoom lens, custom matched to the sensor. I finally passed that camera on to a good friend last year because I felt that it needed more love and attention than I was giving it.
But for a couple of years I shot almost everything with a pair of the R1s. Everything from portraits to theater to architecture. The lens really was amazing. My commercial interest waned when we finally got 24 megapixel cameras that could see in the dark. Then I thought my clients might snub the 10 megapixels in the R1. How foolish was that?
But let me backtrack and tell you why I was (and am) interested in "bridge cameras" to begin with. First of all there is the attraction in, first the Sony R1, and then in the Sony RX10 and the Panasonic, of a bigger than average sensor (compared with most compacts) coupled with a very, very high quality lens. In the case of the Sony it is a Zeiss
