Now for some talk about digital cameras.

My old trusty Canon PowerShot S100 has been getting a bit long in the tooth of late. It's about 4 years old now. It's a nice camera, very small, takes pretty good pictures, and I have a bunch of accessories for it: 2 256MB Compact Flash cards, and about 5 or 6 extra batteries. My biggest problem with it of late is that it takes a whopping 6-7 seconds from turning it on to being able to take a picture. You loose a lot of pictures by waiting 6 or 7 seconds. So, I started looking around for a new camera.

The newer Canon powershot's look quite nice. There is a S400 (which is now discontinued) and a S410 and a S500 There are only minor diffrences between them. The S400 and S410 are 4 megapixel cameras, and the S500 is a 5 megapixel. They look nice, have the exact same controls and form factor as my S100 and I could re-use my accessories. There is only one problem. They are really pricy. The S400/S410 models are about $100 more than any of the other ultracompact 4 megapixel cameras. The S500 is something like 200$ more.

While looking around Jafo mentioned that he was selling his old (well, 3 months old) Casio Exilim EX-Z4 It's about 1/2 the thinkness of the Canons. It has a 2" LCD on the back (the canons have a 1.5"). The price was great, even factoring in having to get a new SD card (it uses SD or MM cards). It also takes it about 2 seconds to be ready to take a picture (my big complaint with the S100). So, I decided to go for it. I picked up the camera from Jafo when he was passing through to Colorado Springs the last night.

Overall I like the camera. There are a few things that are really going to take some getting used to however. The zoom buttons on the Casio are on the back below the shutter release button. On the Canon this was a ring around the shutter release. When you take a picture on the Canon you can hold down the shutter release and it will show the picture you just took until you relase it. On the Casio it will show the picture you just took for a few seconds and then go back to the current display.

On the plus side I really like the LCD. It's big and very easy to look at. It does get a bit grainy at times, but it's still nice to read. I like the amount of time until it can take a picture. It's nice that it has 10MB of memory built in. I don't have my SD card yet, so I have been using it's internal memory to take pictures and then copy them off. The USB interface works fine with my laptop. It shows up as a SCSI disk. Easy to copy things off. The cable is really pretty short tho, so I might look at getting an extender for it. It has a "Manual Focus" mode which is really cool that the Canon didn't.

So far so good, will see how it does once I get my SD card and can start taking lots of pictures. I need to go through the manual too and see all the things it can do.