Bridge Digital Camera : Camera in between DSLR and compact camera

Bridge Digital Camera has the properties of DSLR and compact Digital cameras combined in terms of finishing, quality and features. If you are a beginner or searching to buy a digital camera, before reading this article on Bridge Digital Camera, it might be helpful for you to read our in depth articles on Digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR) and Compact Digital Camera. Bridge Digital Camera sometimes referred as Prosumer (Pro of Professional and Sumer of Consumer). A Bridge Digital Camera can make a newbie fool by appearing as a DSLR for its look.

Technical Details of Bridge Digital Camera

The idea of Bridge Digital Camera is nothing new, Bridge Camera in Film photography existed before. With digital transformation, the combination and adding features of DSLR has been easier.

The design principle of Bridge Digital Camera was to to create a compact, less costly DSLR with fixed lens. The first Bridge Digital Camera based on this principle was marketed on 1997 by Olympus. Later, almost all top manufactures entered the Bridge Digital Camera segment.
Typical pentaprism DSLR viewfinder is replaced with an electronic viewfinder in Bridge Digital Camera. Manual focusing in Bridge Digital Camera is difficult due to the relatively low resolution of the viewfinder and in low light conditions this produce a grainy image on viewfinder. Also, there may be jerky movements for fast moving objects on a Bridge Digital Camera ‘s LCD screen as the image processor can not handle multi threaded operations, still date.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Bridge Digital Camera

Like in the automobile industry, a notchback car is a cheap modification of a hatchback to make it look like a sedan, Bridge Digital Camera is practically a compromise.

Compared with a compact digital compact camera, a bridge digital camera with a zoom lens usually sports a very large focal length range, the lenses can have a zoom factor up to 42x. Due to their small sensors, Bridge Digital Camera can be relatively compact. For example, with a sensor size of 5.76 × 4.29 mm, a twelve-fold zoom lens with a focal length of 36 mm to 432 mm and a maximum aperture of 1: 2.8 can cover the entire zoom range. An equivalent lens with DSLR body, for having a larger image sensor would be significantly larger and heavier and cost several times. Additionally, Bridge Digital Camera can take Macro, (although not really optical macro, it happens due to magnification factor of having small sensor) which otherwise would make a DSLR owner to pay the extra premium for the macro lens.

Compared to a DSLR camera, the optical potential of a Bridge Digital Camera is fixed by the zoom lens that is provided. With few exceptions, the focal length range can not go to the extreme wide angle in Bridge Digital Camera and also more the focal length is, the Bridge Digital Camera becomes expensive. It is true that telephoto converters are available for Bridge Digital Camera, but these are relatively expensive, bulky and generally degrade the image quality.