My New Camera

Yesterday UPS delivered my new camera. It's a Canon S5 IS, a black point and shoot digital just a step or two below the digital SLR's.

I did a lot of research before settling on this model but not enough in my wife's opinion. She tried to encourage me to get a Canon G9, mainly because one of her close girl friends has one and strongly recommended it. This is the lady with whom she went to Thailand and rode on elephants a few years ago and who took a lot of great pictures there with the predecessor of the G9, the G3.

I looked at the G9 briefly early in my research but it cost way more than I had in mind spending, and later, because of that expense, somehow my mind slid it over into being a DSLR, though it is still "just" a point and shoot, too. It differs mainly from the S5 IS in having a 12 megapixel sensor as compared to the S5's 8, meaning that it will take more finely detailed pictures. But on the other hand the lens on the S5 zooms out to 12X, as compared to only 6X on the G9. Maybe the G9, because of that large sensor, has a digital zoom that more than makes up for the difference, but I am not well versed enough in that situation to know as yet, and anyway, the comments I read seemed to say that optical zoom is better than digital zoom. But anyway, maybe tragically, I am not a sender back or an exchanger, and the S5 had no lack of praise in the several hundred comments that users posted on Amazon, and so that's that

I had misgivings anyway about even spending the "mere" $304 for the S5, much less the almost $150 more that the G9 would've cost.

Partly that was because of our new financial situation, which I assume is more restricted than it was just a few months ago. My wife knows much more about that than I do, but still....

Also it was because in recent decades -- ever since we bought this property, in fact, and I started building this house in Virginia 30 years ago -- my picture taking has been sharply reduced, compared to what it was back in the 1960's and the '70's. In addition I still have a perfectly good film SLR, a sturdy Minolta 700, plus I have an also working Minolta X7, a fancier SLR that I inherited from my son. And lastly I've been severely spooked by having been one of those big no-no's in the computer world, a "first adopter." Out of brand loyalty I bought one of the early digital cameras, a Minolta Dimage V. It's a neat little camera but something went wrong with its power system early on, and meanwhile, though the Dimage is strictly stone age compared to the cameras now, it cost nearly as much as the incredibly more advanced G9 and much more than my S5 does now.

So I have this brand new "puggy" camera, as one Amazon commenter called the S5 IS, and it is having the distinction of being the first thing that I've ever bought, to my recollection, that I will have to spend a day or two reading the manual before I put it into any kind of action. And this is no wonder, because this camera has so much packed into an apparatus scarcely four inches on a side. It is a marvel of modern engineering, obviously made in supersterile factories by young female gnomes with 20-50 vision. Otherwise, though I like having manuals and the more pages the beeter,normally I read them only if I get into trouble.

I bought the camera not because, unlike in the past, I'm about to take any big trips. I strictly stay at home, but there I still continually see little things that cry out to be photographed. Plus I want to post pictures here on my weblog, to illustrate things that I talk about. And I need to find out if it's really true that avid picture takers and posters like Steve Bates and NTodd still would have nothing on me, shoud I turn out to have still enough flesh and blood to allow the camera bug to take another bit bite.