Walking the Wall

I bought a new camera today. I couldn’t stand it any longer since my daughter accidentally broke the screen on my Sony Cybershot DSC-W50 camera I have been trying to be patient. The truth is, I was trying to wait until the Fall for my birthday or Winter for Christmas to get a higher quality camera. I couldn’t do it, I can’t stand not having a camera. We couldn’t afford to replace the camera for the same one as just coming off of a new iPod and a new MacBook in the space of this spring; it just wasn’t in the budget to spend $400 on a camera. I figured I’d pick up a cheaper camera until Christmas and then let the kids use the cheaper camera when I got a nicer one. First, I picked up a Nikon Coolpix S51 on clearance and took it back the next day–today. I needed to go cheap but this one just didn’t do it for me: it took pretty good pictures, but it didn’t feel heavy enough in hand, it couldn’t do macros (very important to me, more important than zoom) well, and had a terrible lag to it–it just didn’t work for me.  Now, I love Sony Cybershots, I have had two of them and loved both of them. But the Cybershot that would be in the price range I could afford didn’t have great reviews. I found a camera review site called Digital Camera Resource Page that gave very thorough reviews and even had a suggestion section by price range. That was where I got to the review on a Canon Powershot SD1100 IS that came highly recommended for it’s size and price range. So today on the way to my friend’s birthday lunch I returned the Nikon and took a look at the Powershot–it felt good, the couple macros I took in the store were very promising, no big lag issues, and it was on a good sale. I bought the Chocolate brown on a whim (you can see a picture of it here on Flickr, it’s not mine), I’ve had silver cameras for the last two and just liked the look of the brown although my kids aren’t too impressed with the color. I got a good deal for it on sale, popped the small SD card it came packaged in, stuck in the battery (which had a nice charge to get me through the party), threw it into the hard case I bought to avoid a repeat of my Sony’s broken screen, and off to the party I went.

We were in a small, private room in the restaurant so there was no natural lighting and it all had a yellow cast and yet despite that, I felt like it took great pictures. I snapped some other shots when I got home and put a 2gig SD card in (which says it can take 900+ on the screen which can’t be right), though it was getting dark and yet despite the lower lighting it took a nice macro shot of this small flower and a couple nice ones of one of our dogs who never stays still. I didn’t play with any settings yet, this is just out of the box. So far, I’m very impressed and don’t (as yet) feel like I’ve lost too much. I haven’t tried taking a movie yet. More testing to come tomorrow, but for tonight I’m just relieved to have a camera again!