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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One thought on “New Toy

  1. 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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