Yesterday, Dan Bricklin took me camera-shopping at his favorite camera store, Newtonville Camera (in, guess where, Newtonville, MA).

My current camera, a Sony DSC-S50 is about 4 years old. It’s 2.1 megapixels and only ASA 100. Worse, I’ve never been impressed by the vividness of the images it takes. So, I’m looking for a camera that I’ll use primarily for family photos, almost always for viewing on screen. The immediate spur for the purchase, however, is that I want to be able to take pictures at the Democratic Convention without having to use a flash. So, here are some of my criteria, in no particular order:

1. ASA of at least 400, and takes good photos indoors without a flash
2. At least 5 megapixels, just in case
3. $400 or so. Much more than that is hard to “justify,” although I’m open to disagreement
4. Excellent image quality — which to me, technically, means that the pictures look real good
5. Even when I owned a filmic SLR, I never changed the lens, so apparently that doesn’t matter to me
6. Even when I owned an SLR, I never manually set the settings, so apparently that doesn’t matter to me
7. I prefer small to big and light to heavy, but it doesn’t matter much. I actually have trouble manipulating the ultra small cameras
8. Has a viewfinder. (You may take it as obvious, but my current camera doesn’t have one.)
9. Prefer longer battery life to shorter. Duh.
10. Prefer less time between pressing the button and the picture being taken
11. At least 3x non-digital zoom
12. Simply owning it will, at long last, make me cool

I am, of course, open to having this list refined, extended or ridiculed.

The current leading contender is the Canon Powershot S500 Elph

Categories: Uncategorized dw