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