Our digital camera is quite old. It has only a 1.3 megapixel sensor, takes FOUR AAs, and uses SmartMedia. You often have to blow on the card to get it to work. Compared to current cameras, it’s huge and heavy.
It’s one of those pieces of technology we know we need to upgrade, but we didn’t have a good reason to buy one for a specific occasion or agreement on what we should get.
I’ve been partial to the Casio Exlim line and the popular Canon PowerShot Elph. Both are ridiculously small, which means you’re more likely to bring it with you. A digital camera you left in the car doesn’t take great pictures. I also liked that they started up quickly and had nice LCDs that allow you to legitimately view pictures on it.
My biggest problem with these cameras was that they used proprietary rechargable batteries. I use my Powerex recharger religiously. I like to know that if I run out of juice I can grab a few other rechargables I’ve charged or in the worst case swap them out from another device.
Anne was really concerned about zoom. Since digital zoom is useless, optical zoom was what she wanted. Most small camera max out at 3x. Some slightly larger ones go to 4x. She wanted more like 8-10x. Those cameras are way bigger. (She also preferred cameras that had a bit more to grip, so this was a positive in her opinion.) I just didn’t see myself carrying it around and using it. We’re not even amateur photographers and I had no idea what we’d be taking pictures of that was so far away…
We looked at cameras at Costco or wherever else we came across them but always left in a size v. zoom stalemate.
Then something unexpected happened. At Christmas Anne’s mom gave us a Canon PowerShot SD450. We hadn’t asked for one or even discussed it with her in my recollection. The SD450 is a 5 megapixel camera with a 3x zoom and 2.5 in screen. It’s tiny.
You’d think that this would be the end of it, but it wasn’t. The camera favored my preferences, so it was up to Anne to decide whether or not to keep it. We left the box sealed and brought it back home to California. We unpacked our suitcases and put the still unopened camera box on the kitchen counter. And there it sat. Days went by. We didn’t speak of it.
One night we decided to go look at cameras at Best Buy to see if we could decide to exhange or keep the one we had. It also gave us a chance to visit the new Best Buy in Sunnyvale. The store was a mini-Best Buy and didn’t have a lot of cameras. That didn’t prevent us from spending an hour trying them all out and yet leaving no closer to a decision. We stopped by Circuit City too on the way home and saw a greater selection. Still no decision.
Weeks went by and the camera box began collecting dust on the counter. One night in late January I brought up the subject again and Anne said she had actually decided a while ago to keep it. Finally! A new gadget to play with!
I took it out turned it on, and tried to get the cats to stand still long enough to be test subjects. It was a nice camera.
Though it was far from a sure thing, the gift turned out to be less about a camera than a decision about a camera. The decision turned out to be a good one.
That decision was not ratified until this vacation when we used it a lot. Anne took a couple hundred pictures and appreciated the small size very much. We took it everywhere, which is exactly what I hoped for.
No camera is perfect though. My issues are all related to batteries. The battery is a little thing, but you can’t replace it with any type of standard battery. The charger is a little plate that plugs into the wall. I’d prefer to have a tip to use with my iGo universal charger, but they don’t make one. More annoying is that you have to take the battery out to charge it. You can’t just plug in the camera or let it charge over USB while plugged into a computer. Worst is that there doesn’t appear to be a way to check the power left in the battery, so you have to guess when the battery needs to be charged, lest you find out halfway through the day that it’s dead. This problem manifested itself when Anne complained that I was wasting the battery when viewing some of the pictures I just took. It seems the only way around this is to buy a second battery and keep it charged too. That’s annoying.
On the last day of the cruise I spent some time collecting all the pictures my sister and my parents had taken and copying them to all our laptops. Anne took most of our pictures and the numbered more than triple the others had taken combined. That’s a good measure of success.
The rest of the day was spent lounging and taking in a few activities. The captain’s talk was interesting. The guy who does the ice sculptures did a demonstration. At dinner we celebrated Anne’s birthday a week early. At the final evening show I was conned into going on stage to particiate in a paper airplane competition. Despite my innovative tailfin, my plane crashed badly. My lovely parting gift was a keychain.
Some of the show cast started bawling onstage during their performance. Apparently for many of them their 8 month contract was over. Yeah, I’d be crying for joy – that I finally got to get off the ship.
Anne redeemed the Ship Shape dollars we collected for a free t-shirt and visor. We ate more food and ice cream. It was good to have a lazy transition day before a day of travel home.