Originally posted by Marc Sabatella snip......and a P&S "travel zoom" for casual use. The latter is way lighter than a superzoom SLR lens, ...
Marc
In a lot of ways I agree with you. I have used a somewhat old now, Kodak DX7590 EV P&S. while it is only 10:1 zoom range, it is still pretty impressive when you consider it is 36mm-350mm full frame equivelent at F2.8-3.2. It was a fairly advanced EV bridge camera in 2004 at 5MP,
The real issue, and I am sure many many people have the same opinion as me, is that it is not wide enough. I have a .45 wide angle adaptor for it, and on that format lens it seems to work much better than on a normal wide angle lens on a DSLR, which converts it to 17-170mm.
To be honest, if they made a P&S with a slightly larger sensor, - perhaps a 4/3 sensor, and offered a 7mm-50mm zoom (14-100mm full frame equivelent) or even a 10mm-70mm zoom (20-140mm equivelent) that would be all I would ever travel with, unless I was really serious. My BIL just bought a new toy a Leica M9 range finder (he usually buys nikon) , and has 3 lenses from 20mm through 50mm. that is now his travel kit, and he leaves his full frame nikon at home. (just think of the pentax primes you could get with the price of an M9 and 3 Leica old lenses!)
I showed him my *istD and SMC Tak 35 F2 and asked him what the difference really was