Best Compact Cameras for Travel

The FZ55 is the least expensive camera here that still gives you optical zoom and a rechargeable battery, and that is most of why we keep recommending it. At 3.7 ounces it disappears into a jacket pocket, and the 28-140mm lens covers the two things most travel photos turn out to be: a street or a room, and a person standing in it.

Photos have a look, bright and slightly crunchy and very friendly to the built-in flash, that reads as a 2000s digital camera in the best way, and the boxy body matches it. Video tops out at 1080p and the 2.7-inch screen is fixed and not touch-sensitive, which is where the money went. In daylight, none of that got in our way.

The real risk is longevity. Units that stop working within weeks and batteries that give up their charge early are a large enough share of what people experience that the seller matters as much as the camera. Buy where returns are easy, shoot a few hundred frames in the first month, and keep the receipt.

It takes Class 10 SD, SDHC, or SDXC cards up to 512GB and ships without one, so order the card with the camera instead of discovering that on the first morning. Charging happens inside the camera over USB with the supplied adapter, about two hours from empty.

Set the ZV-1F beside our top pick and the difference is the sensor: 1 inch against 1/2.3 inch, with a fixed 20mm f/2.0 lens in front of it. That is why the Sony is the camera that comes out when the day ends after the sun does, in restaurants, museums, and blue-hour streets where the superzooms start to struggle.

The trade is reach, and it is a real one. Twenty millimeters is wide, so you frame with your feet, and anything more than a few steps away becomes a crop rather than a zoom. In exchange you get 20.1 megapixels to crop into, which buys back some of that distance before the files fall apart.

Focus is where it earns its keep: eye detection and tracking hold a person as they walk toward you, and that matters more than zoom for the photos most of us actually take of each other. The screen flips out to the side for selfies, the three-capsule mic with its wind screen handles a breezy street, and at 254 grams it disappears into a small bag.

A kickstand folds out of the V10's body, forward or back, so the camera stands on a cafe table, hangs off a shelf, or tilts up for a talking-head shot without a tripod. That one piece of molded plastic tells you who this camera is for before you turn it on.

It is a video camera that happens to take stills, and it is what we hand anyone whose trip is going to be filmed rather than photographed. Inside is a 15.2-megapixel 1-inch sensor, the same size class as the Sony, behind a fixed 19mm lens, with 4K recording, a screen that flips up to face you, and three stabilization modes once the firmware is current. We found the wide angle forgiving: hold it at arm's length and the whole street stays in frame.

The lens is fixed, so there is no zoom at all; you move instead, which is fine in a market and useless across a valley. Stills are perfectly usable at 15.2 megapixels, but the buttons and menus are built around recording, and a photographer will spend the first week hunting for things that are usually on a dial.

Before the WPZ2 goes anywhere near water, you check the rubber gasket for sand and grit, close the door, and lock it. That routine is the whole deal with a camera rated to 15 meters for an hour, and it is why we are comfortable carrying this one to a pool and not, say, a phone in a pouch. It is also shockproof from 2 meters and dustproof, which covers the rest of a beach week.

The rest is ordinary in a useful way: a 27-108mm lens with 4x optical zoom, 1080p video, a 2.7-inch screen, and Wi-Fi for sending shots to your phone without a computer. It charges in the camera over USB and takes microSD cards rather than the full-size SD most cameras here use, so pack the right card and give it a full charge the night before.

Underwater is where the limits show. Anything moving fast, a fish or a friend jumping in, tends to smear, and the screen is close to useless in direct sun, so you frame, shoot, and review later on the boat. Rinse it in fresh water after salt and never open the door while it is wet; both habits are in the manual and both are the difference between a working camera and a warranty claim.

Twenty times zoom for roughly what the waterproof Kodak costs is the ZS20's pitch, and it holds up: a 24-480mm lens with optical stabilization, a 3-inch touchscreen, GPS, and a body that weighs 6.56 ounces. It is the cheapest way in this group to get a genuinely long lens.

The reach is the point. At 480mm you can pull a detail off a building or a bird out of a tree, and the stabilization keeps it steady enough to be worth having, though a wall or a railing helps at the far end. GPS tags each shot with where it was taken, which is more useful than it sounds when you get home and cannot remember the name of the square.

It is an older design and we treat it that way. The menus are crowded with settings you will scroll past, the interface assumes you want to learn it, and the whole camera feels a generation behind the Panasonic at the top of this list. What it still does is deliver long reach and location tagging for a fraction of that price, and for daylight travel that is a fair trade. Burst shooting at 10 fps and a 3D mode are odd leftovers, but the panorama mode is genuinely useful on a viewpoint.

Thirty times zoom is the same figure the Panasonic at the top of this list claims, and the Canon gets there for a fraction of the price. A 24-720mm lens with optical stabilization is the entire reason to consider the SX400 IS, and for a certain kind of trip it is reason enough.

In the hand it is light and simple: a 3-inch LCD, a real grip, and Smart Auto that picks a scene for you rather than making you choose. The stabilization does actual work at the long end, because 720mm of equivalent reach is unusable handheld without it, and the Intelligent IS keeps the frame from shaking itself apart while you find your subject.

The sensor is a 1/2.3-inch CCD, a generation behind the CMOS chips elsewhere here, and it wants daylight; indoor shots are where the camera shows its price. Nothing about the body feels cheap, though, and the controls land where your thumb expects them, which is more than we can say for some of the newer designs.

We keep it on the list for one job: maximum reach on a small budget, on a wildlife boat or in a stadium where your subjects are far away and the light is good. If you want a single camera for the whole trip, including dinner and clips, look at the Panasonic ZS99 instead, because the reach is the same and everything around it is newer.