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Friday Slide Show: A Megazoom at the Academy of Sciences
11 September 2026
In 2014, when we last presented a slide show of the California Academy of Sciences, we shot with a Panasonic FZ150 and a Nikon D300. But in 2010, we brought along an Olympus SP800UZ megazoom. Dinosaurs were wandering around the new facility then.
Megazooms aren't dinosaurs, being one of the few digicam designs that survived the smartphone. Smartphones don't, as a rule, do telephoto.
The 2010-era SP800UZ, for example, had a 30x optical zoom (28-840mm equivalent) matched to its 14-megapixel sensor. And the 2010 FZ150 offered a 24x optical zoom (25-600mm equivalent) with a 12.1-megapixel sensor.
You won't find a smartphone sporting that kind of telephoto chops. A software-aided 10x zoom is about as good as it gets for us.
But you can find a used SP800UZ for well under $100 these days, although the FZ150 is typically more than $100 used. The cheaper SP800UZ lacks an EVF, however. You use the monitor to compose.
Our main complaint with the SP800UZ was focusing. You couldn't set the lens to infinity or focus manually. It was autofocus only. And autofocus wasn't entirely reliable. Many of our Academy shots were out of focus.
We didn't like the camera -- but what about the photos we took?
We put a small selection through Lightroom Classic to see if a modern edit could make them as attractive as a smartphone image. And once again, we had a ball doing it. If you know what you're doing, editing is fun.
The Academy of Sciences is an exotic spot in the middle of the city but it can be tough to photograph there. In the aquarium, it's very dark and the "models" are behind glass. In the brighter rainforest, you can frighten the birds, although the butterflies don't mind.
