While smartphones are doing their best to kill point-and-shoot cameras, there’s still quite a bit of life left in the mid to high end, as we saw at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show. One of the most interesting categories is bridge cameras, with superzooms lenses of up to 60x that start from as wide as 20mm and go up to 1200mm. What are bridge cameras? Bridge cameras fill the gap between low-cost point-and-shoots and more expensive mirrorless ILCs and DSLRs by melding the best features of both. They have fixed long zoom lenses and easy to use Auto and Scene modes as well as advanced settings, (electronic) viewfinders, and excellent image quality.
To compete with smartphones, these models often come with Wi-Fi connectivity and apps for iOS and Android for simple picture transfers and remote viewfinder features. Bridge cameras also usually fall between the two categories when it comes to pricing. If you are looking for a better camera than what’s included in your smartphone, one of these bridge cameras is what you need to get the professional quality pictures you want without the technical difficulties and high prices of ILCs and DSLRs. Budget bridge cameras K.T. Bradford / Techlicious On the budget end of the spectrum, both Nikon and Panasonic announced cameras that come in around $300. Panasonic’s Lumix LZ40 has a wide-angle 42x zoom lens (22-924mm f 3.0-6.5) and a good Intelligent Auto function. To keep costs down the company skipped the multi-angle LCD and the viewfinder. Final U.S. pricing won’t be out until close to the March release date, but Panasonic is definitely aiming this one at budget buyers. Nikon’s bridge camera, the Coolpix L830, is one of the smallest ones we saw at the show. The 34x zoom (22.5-765 mm) isn’t as impressive as others—a sacrifice to keep the size down—but when combined with 68x Dynamic Zoom you still get the ability to grab a decent shot even when very far away. We like the deep and comfortable grip, the tiltable LCD, and the fact that it runs on AA