Looking at those mother's day pictures, I relived not only the beautiful moments of the day, but also the frustrating moments caused by my digital camera. I should say that the camera itself is amazing. In its day, it was the best in its price class - winner of the Editor's Choice Award - and highly recommended by all the camera reviewers. But, the world of technology changes quickly. And with today's cameras coming down in price, there's no reason to stick with a camera that takes over 10 seconds to warm up, has a one-to-two second lag time from the time you click the shutter button, and takes more than 15 seconds to transfer the image to its 8MB SmartMedia memory card. Oh, did I mention that you can eat through a set of alkaline batteries before you fill the camera's memory?
The images I've posted on this site, although they were taken with this camera, were intentionally reduced in size and image quality to facilitate quick load times over low speed internet connections. The typical picture, in its "normal" size, is about 100-200K. By the time it's posted here, the size has been reduced to 10-20K. This past weekend, we had to stop taking pictures at 55 shots when the memory card was filled. There were at least that many additional shot opportunities that were missed due to the slow data transfer times and low memory capacity.
It was all too much to bear. I realized there are just too many "photo-worthy" moments when you have small grandchildren, and when you miss an opportunity for the perfect shot, that opportunity is gone for good. The day after our trip to Colasanti's, we went to Future Shop to find a new camera. Future Shop had more than 50 models on display, and I spent the better part of the day researching various internet web sites to determine which camera would offer the best range of features at the most reasonable price.
and the winner is...
After much research, and test-drives of several models at the store, the winner is the Canon PowerShot S400 ELPH. This 4 Megapixel camera costs about the same as the camera above, and allows photo quality pictures to be printed up to 8x10. But, for the most part, we'll be using this camera to record tons of pictures and even some audio/video clips (up to 3 minutes in length).
With the 128MB Compact Flash card, we can store almost 1500 pictures at 640x480 resolution without having to unload the memory card. And the time needed to store even the highest resolution photos is less than one-half second. Finally, due to its compact size, my wife can carry it in her purse at all times.
No more missed photo-ops!
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