It was a sad day back in October when I dropped my old Pentax Optio 3.2 Megapixels water resistant digital camera.
I bought it back when I still had a film SLR and could buy film for it but I needed a way to easily take picture in a format to upload images to sell stuff on eBay. It had the ability to get within a couple of inches of a subject and still focus and it was water proof which came in handy when snorkeling. We recorded close to two decades of memories with that old friend, but after a hard fall on concrete it was done.

So it was time to go shopping. But what to buy? It's been so long since I've kept up with photography trends and technology, some research was needed. Since computers have been miniaturized it turns out that if you put them in cameras you can do away with the mirror in a SLR. Big improvement. A compact body with interchangeable lenses.

I also knew what I missed with the old Pentax.
I missed manual control of aperture & shutter speed, which is fine for me but for my wife it would be hopelessly lost so the ease of making the Canon EOS M100 a point & shoot gizmo or an old school manual thingy had me sold.

So I bought one.

But would it do what I really wanted after I got it home? You never really know if you like a camera until you use it. So once I got the battery charged up and did some reading of the manual I figured the best way to get familiar was to take some pictures and try & learn what some of the presets produce and how easy it was to use in manual mode. I don't do videos so I will not speak to those functions but the other two basic modes, Automatic & Manual are what concern me.

The automatic mode turns the camera into a point & shot gizmo that anyone can use but switching to manual mode gives you not only complete manual control but a good number of useful and not so useful in camera presets. Most of these presets FX's could be duplicated in Photoshop but fun none the less.

First I will show you some of the results from a few of the presets then a couple in manual then speak to my likes & dislikes.

I have a African Violet in bloom and set it against a neutral colored wall in a south facing room awash in natural light as my subjects for a few of the presets. There are about 23 presets that I have found so far and you will be happy that I'm not going to show all of them now. Just a few so you get the Idea. My subject does not lend it self to the sports or smooth skin presets nor night scenes.

Close Up Preset

Black & White Preset

Art Bold Preset

for me a most useful preset is the

Back Lit Preset

I had a poinsettia in my south facing window and the preset seemed to do a nice job in short order of an often problematic shot.

Full Manual

So for me this is the fun part but I was in for some nice surprises withe the M100 in manual. Which brings me to a thing I love about the M100 is the touch view screen. It even flips around for selfies and video. But the real treat is that it not only shows you the affect of your aperture setting but the result of your shutter speed! No more guessing! Not only that, you can select either the shutter or the aperture from the touch view screen and adjust the setting with a dial on the outside of the shutter button. Now I'm sure these features have been around for ages but for me the last time I was able to set apertures and shutters was the previous century, so forgive my excitement. Making creativity easy seems a good thing, well, at least fun.

I placed my violet in the direct south window light and took a manual close up from the side. I wanted to see how close I could get & still focus. As well, since it was in bright harsh light I wanted to bring out only the highlights hoping to expose the iridescence and texture of the petals. Not as close as I would like but the 24 mega pixels made up for it out of camera.

F11 1/80

After a trip in Photoshop I massaged this out for a close up investigation.

Buyer's Remorse?

NO!

Overall I'm happy. I seemed to be able to get it to do what I want quickly. It's light. It was cheap! Even came with a built in flash and they thru in a strap. It will even do video and the flip screen would be great for doing podcasts and such. It's a nice little camera with more features than I need yet easy to use.

But time will tell so I reserve the right to change my opinion at any time.

Cheers

GW