Thursday, December 18, 2008

New Digital Camera?

I got a new toy in the mail today, a Canon SX-10 IS. I'm not entirely convinced it's right for me... it's kind of a bizarre bastard child occupying the space between point-and-shoots and full DSLRs. It's three times bigger than my old camera, but 1.5-2 times smaller than a DSLR. It has an extraordinarily versatile lens, 28-560mm (which is fairly wide to huge zoom), and zero-centimeter macro capability (i.e., the subject can touch the glass)... for a DSLR that'd be 3-4 lenses, and at least $2000 and 10 pounds of glass (but higher quality glass, of course).

However, it's way bigger than the P&S that I've been taking on hiking trips so far (36-105mm) and been fairly happy with, and it has the same kind of small, noisy sensor that compact cameras do, and the user interface is rather weird in places. Is the fancy lens worth the extra mass and bulk? I'll contemplate this question over the next few days.

This is a picture of my cat. Believe it or not, it's a 1/2 second exposure, hand-held. Sometimes image-stabilization really kicks ass (click through - it's even reasonably sharp full-size). [Edit 1/5/09 - no, it's actually not very sharp at all.]

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