Summer 2019 has come – time for holidays and travels. You want to bring not only souvenirs, but also pleasant memories from a good trip and share these memories with friends and relatives. And of course the best way to do this is to show your photos and videos taken during your trip.

In the age of mobile photography, we are used to shoot photos and videos with smartphones in everyday life. But a smartphone will not be the best tool for photo and video shooting while travelling, because:

With rare exceptions, smartphones lack the ability to magnify an image without losing quality, but if such an opportunity is present, the optical magnification occurs by switching smartphones cameras, and the tele-lens sensor often has a lower resolution than the main camera sensor. Smartphone cameras have a dynamic range of 8 bits or less, which negatively affects the shooting of contrasting scenes – for example, on a bright sunny day, bright areas of a photo or video will be overexposed, and the shadows will fail to black. Moreover, even if the smartphone has the ability to take pictures in the RAW DNG, it’s unlikely to save your shots, even in post-processing. Due to the fact that the size of the camera sensor is small, you can not make high-quality photos or videos in the dark. The picture will be noisy because of the increased exposure, it is also blurred. If you want to take a picture with a blurred background (bokeh), this is done with the help of artificial processing by a smartphone processor and with such processing artifacts often occur, and the picture looks unnatural due to a sharp change of sharpness and background blurring. And shooting video with “bokeh” in the current development of the smartphone-building is generally impossible at all. The smartphone battery capacity is limited and will be spent not only for calls in a remote location from cellular base stations, but also for photo-video shooting. And to recharge the battery in the journey is not always possible.

So, if you decide that you still need to buy a travel camera, let’s formulate the main criteria for a travel-friendly camera:

compact and light weight

battery life

enough camera megapixels

the ability to shoot 4K video

built-in viewfinder for shooting on a bright sunny day

built-in flash for shooting in the dark and in bright back daylight

optical zoom

video image stabilization

desirable to be able selfie shooting.

In addition, I will clarify the importance of 4K video. We’re going to keep the memory of the event for a long time. But it will be a shame, you see, in five years so that everything was filmed “in this unsharp FullHD” 🙂

We will choose cameras based on prices in the B&H Photo store (we can also buy them in other stores). Let’s sort cameras by price and include 3 filters:

4K video shooting

built-in viewfinder

built-in flash.

And we get in this way a rating of cameras for travel 2019 at a price of up to $ 1,000 (inclusive) of essentially 6 cameras.

Essentially because:

Lumix G7 is obsolete

Lumix G85 is not so compact

Lumix GH4 – outdated video camera

Fujifilm X-T100 in fact can not record 4K video

Fujifilm X-T20 is outdated technically.

DSLR cameras are not considered, as in cheap compact DSLRs there is a small dim viewfinder, with the exception of Pentax, but Pentax itself is still an exception…

Compact cameras with non-interchangeable lenses are also not considered, due to the overpriced. There is an exception in this segment – the Lumix LX100, but you can only buy it if you have a service center nearby that can clean the dust that accumulates between the sensor and the fixed lens of this camera.

Places in the ranking are distributed according to a single criterion: the price per kit of camera + lens.