What's a "point and shoot" camera?

Photography cognoscenti bandy about the term “point and shoot” as the worst possible insult to a camera. As in “oh, that’s just a point and shoot camera, those things suck.”

“Point and shoot” means to me a camera where you can point it and press the shutter button, and then the camera will automatically focus and select an appropriate aperture and shutter speed. Thus, such a camera requires a minimal amount of skill and photographic knowledge. You can use it even if you don't understand aperture or shutter speed.

Under the above definition, practically all digital cameras are “point and shoot” cameras, including big and expensive digital SLRs. They all have an auto mode.

Thus it turns out that “point and shoot” is a horribly misused term, because it’s usually used to describe a non-SLR digital camera. So why not just call them what they are, non-SLR digital cameras?

And what exactly is it about the SLR design that makes a digital camera more advanced? The purpose of the SLR design is to make the camera easier to use by giving you a better optical viewfinder and faster autofocus (but not better autofocus). In this sense, it actually requires more skill to use a non-SLR camera because you have to work around the slower auto-focus and lack of a through-the-lens (TTL) optical viewfinder. So maybe users of non-SLR digital cameras should be the ones making fun of the DSLR users instead of the other way around.

Comments

[Duh]

Are you seriously asking this question? It's called a point-and-shoot because that's all you can do, not because that's one thing you can do. And, among the many advantages of an SLR are that you can manually control the depth of field, shutter speed, focal area, flash, etc. to get the effect you want, not the only one the camera can give you.