Well, I finally broke down and bought a new digital Camera. Not that I wanted to buy a new one, but my 5- year old Olympus -60 finally halfway bought the dust. Meaning that the lens only seems to want to extend/retract half the time. I did that DIY kind of thing where you whack it kind of hard to set it straight, and some little metal rod came out of the camera. Boo. I must admit I am hard on my toys. I'm clumsy and not always careful. And I have two boys who are even harder on toys- so it's amazing that camera worked as long as it did. Also, it was all stainless and pretty, and had a 'slider' lens cover that I really liked. Oh, and it took good pix. I preferred to stay with Olympus because I have the accessories, but I just couldn't justify the price considering how hard things are with my mortgage right now. So, after looking at Best Buy (Comp USA is gone now), I did the right thing and bought a camera from our locally owned camera shop, Boots. If you ever need parts for a camera from 50-80 years ago, they are definitely the place.
Anyway, VvonV and myself finally narrowed it down to the Nikon Coolpix S560. I'd been a little turned off by all those annoying ads by Ashton, but this camera is the bare bones- no trendy little useless blings.
I just need my camera to take decent pictures. I don't need bells and whistles. In fact, I rather despise bells and whistles. This one is a 5x zoom, which is ok. A 7x zoom would have been nice. And, it was petty, but they only had black. I tend to choose silver or stainless in almost anything I buy- it just looks cleaner. So far it seems servicable. And easy to use. I passed over several cameras that seemed like I'd have to get a degree to use them. I'll post pix later of my first attempts with it to capture food pix.
One drawback, for me, was that it came with a 'free' leather case. Everybody knows nothing is free, and that the case was built into the $169.00 price. I'd prefer not to subsidise some leather factory. Why not issue the camera with a 15-20 dollar credit towards the case of your choice? As it is, I ended up having to buy a separate faux leather case for about $15. Oh, and the camera doesn't come with a memory card, so you'll have to buy one. A 2-gig cost me about $15. Prices really have come down. If I recall correctly, my beloved Olympus cost almost $500.
I tend to become fond of things. I don't like consumerism, and planned obsolescence drives me crazy. It would have cost more to fix my old Olympus than to buy a new camera. That's just full of crazy. Oh, well. The old Olympus still semi-works, so it'll be ok for the kids to use, and if worse comes to worse, we can take it apart and see how digital cameras are made.
We'll see how my future pictures on this blog, my other blog, my webpage and my eHow articles look. That's really the only test.
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