This 2-year-old discontinued P&S from Olympus has amazing amount of manual control for its compact size (slightly smaller and thinner than the uber Sony RX100 IV). In video shooting as in stills, aperture, shutter speed, ISO and white balance are all selectable in P,S,A, and M modes. It even has a built-in ND to control dept of field in daylight and to control the motion in video to minimize judder. Picture modes such as natural, portrait and vivid are also available along with picture profiles such as contrast level, saturation, sharpness and gradation bias. The lens has a limited zoom range of 5x but goes as fast as f1.8 at the wide end to f2.7 and the tele end which makes the camera quite useful in low light because the sensor size is a small 1/2.3" 12M pixel CMOS.The downsides are the AF being slow to lock on and often hunting in low light. Aperture adjustment is not perfectly smooth while recording video. Exposure changes in steps are sometimes noticeable. The sensor based stabilization is good in stills mode but not effective for video. This sample video had some help with stabilization in my NLE.In all, it's a good pocketable camera and camcorder at about less than US$200 or so if you can still find one new. Used ones are probably $50-100 at most. Too bad they don't make cameras like this any more. People would rather have a good shooting cellphone nowadays but how many phones out there can give you aperture, shutter speed and picture profile controls, let alone a built-in ND filter and a fairly fast zoom lens?

タグ: olympus-xz10, olympus-compact-camera, olympus-test-video, olympus-point-&-shoot, olympus-p&s