New Toy

As men­tioned in a post ear­lier today, I got a new toy this week­end. I prob­a­bly shouldn’t have, but Ariesna kind of ambushed me into doing it and I’ve researched my choice of toy enough to know that I’m going to like it.

What is the new toy you ask? I finally got myself a new cam­era. My old one was a Pen­tax K1000 SE (all man­ual, 35mm). My new one is a Canon Pow­er­Shot S500 Dig­i­tal ELPH. It’s a 5 megapixel cam­era but it’s teeny-tiny (roughly the size of a deck of play­ing cards) and the best part is that even my bear paws fit on the thing with­out smash­ing half the but­tons. There’s a nice wide, clear spot on the back to put my right thumb, the lens is shifted enough to the left (as seen from the back of the cam­era) so that I’ve got room to put my fin­gers across the front of the cam­era giv­ing me a fairly, solid grip. The left side is a bit more crowded, but there’s enough room on the top & bot­tom of the cam­era that I can steady it when needed. The zoom on this cam­era is noth­ing to write home about (3x opti­cal, 12x dig­i­tal) but that’s the price you pay for com­pact­ness. I’ve only played with it a lit­tle bit so far, but I can say that I’m really dig­ging it. Though my co-workers are a bit annoyed see­ing the flash go off. That’s ok; I won’t be tak­ing any more pic­tures around the office (for now) and will delete the test shots that I made. Though I do plan on car­ry­ing this cam­era with me every­where, since it’s so small and since there’s been so many times that I’ve wished I was car­ry­ing a camera.

Oh and in a related note, though the camera’s specs say it only works with Win­dows & Mac­in­tosh com­put­ers; I was able to browse/download the pho­tos on the cam­era using Digikam under SuSE Linux 9.0 Pro under KDE 3.2.2. Score!

Right, back to work for me. Again. *sigh*

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About Mark McKibben

Mark works as a [REDACTED] for [REDACTED], currently residing in Iowa. CoffeeBear.net is a place for him to blather on about whatever strikes his fancy. He currently spends his "free" time working on a photography project, playing with his cat and attempting to keep his wife happy (not necessarily in that order).

One Comment

  1. Mark says:
    August 15th, 2005 at 4:15 pm

    I was just killing some time by going through my old entries and slap­ping Tech­no­rati tags on them. When I ran across this entry; it reminded me of a long ago ques­tion I got via email. So I’ve decided to open com­ments on the entry to add some addi­tional notes in rela­tion to that question.

    At the time of this entry, Digikam con­nected to my cam­era using USB PTP Mode (? I think that’s what it was called, but I am work­ing from mem­ory here). Now that I’m using SuSE Linux 9.2, with KDE upgraded to 3.4.2, Digikam actu­ally detects my cam­era as the cor­rect cam­era model. Although, wear-and-tear on the cam­era has made using the cam­era that way very dif­fi­cult; the slider switch doesn’t like to go into play­back mode. I mostly trans­fer my pho­tos by putting the flash card into the mul­ti­me­dia card reader Michelle & I received as one of our wed­ding gifts.

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