Camera

If all goes smoothly this week, I'll have a new digital camera by the weekend. I've ordered it online from a shop O's used before and it should only take a few days to get here, though it is coming from a middle-of-nowhere town with the absurd name of Urk. On Saturday I thought I was sure of the camera I was going to get, but I started to look at other options and then my mind was changed after checking out the cameras first-hand in a shop.

My first option was the Canon Powershot A630 (the stupid letters and numbers these cameras have as names. And then it turns out that the camera I'm getting is called something different over here, with a different number, so at first I thought the shops didn't carry it because I didn't see the right number). I thought the A630 would be good because it's similar, but much smaller, to the old G3 I was used to. It even has the nice flip-out screen feature. But after comparing it to the even smaller Powershot SD630, I decided a smaller size and a few less options was probably better since I'm not sure how much I'd dig into the manual settings. Also, since the point was to have something very compact, I figured I'd better get a camera that is quite pocketable.

While I left the shop really liking the SD630 (and the screen on the back is huge), after getting home and researching some more I ended up settling on the camera which is the next step up from that one, the SD700. It doesn't have quite as massive a screen, but that's ok, it has pretty much the same features, but with the added benefit of image stabilization and a better zoom. From what I read online these features were going to be worth the bit of extra cost. So, that is the camera I have ordered. It looks quite stylish and overall was highly recommended in various reviews, so I think I'll be happy with it. And it will be my own camera, not a hand-me-down, and I can start setting up the photos on my computer and maybe join the Flickr crowd and all that.

After ordering my camera, I was enjoying digging back in the camera reviews to see how fast things have evolved in just 5 or 6 years. Going back not quite 3 years, and the layout of the buttons on a similar Canon camera is very different, clustered around a tiny 1.5 inch screen and leaving a lot of blank silver space (scroll down almost halfway to the photo of the back of the camera). For comparison, the screen on the camera I'm getting is 2.5 inches; the one on the SD630 that is massive is 3 inches. You go back to one of the first ultra compact cameras from 2000 and it's pretty sparse on the buttons on the back, has only 2.1 megapixels, and costs about $600. Yeesh.