Friday, July 25, 2008

What the hell???



Okay, so I dropped our little Canon PowerShot A75 while we were walking around Chicago. Seemed to work fine, although I messed up the settings when I pulled it out of its case to take a shot ... so a number of my shots were vastly overexposed. But then that evening, when we were trying to take pictures of Jack and Claire, the Cutest Nephew And Niece In The Entire World, the flash wouldn't fire. And the camera kept having problems.

Okay, okay, I know when I shouldn't mourn, but move on. Especially as this camera was about 4 years old, and at its best, could only take a 3.2 megapixel image. I'm not a "bigger is better" kind of guy (at least that's what I tell my wife), but in this case, I decided that I'd like something that shoots a bit bigger, so hopefully if I grabbed a good spur-of-the-moment shot, I could always blow it up to 8x10 and frame it. So I bought a new quick shot camera, a Canon PowerShot SD850IS. It was actually not that terribly expensive, which is nice, and it works pretty much the same as all the Canons I've owned, so I don't need to fiddle around too much with the instructions. It's a point and shoot, which is what I want for taking around on the days I don't feel like lugging around my SLR.

But it's friggin' neat ... first off, the thing has Image Stabilization, which is a nice feature. I'm not sure how they can put it in a $200 camera, but if you want a Canon SLR lens with IS, it's well over $1000 (which puts it about $800 over my price limit), but I shan't complain, because it works nicely.

But complete geek/neo-luddite that I am, I'm actually really impressed with this feature where you click on a setting, the camera picks a color in the viewfinder, and then only keeps that ONE color (or two, it appears), turning EVERYTHING else in the image black and white. Okay, I know some people can do this in Photoshop, but I can't do squat in Photoshop, so the fact that the camera does this automatically just amazes me. I have no idea how it works, but it's cool, in my 1980s computer mind (hey, remember I thought the Commodore Vic 20 was cool, too).



Now of course, I want to run out and take all sorts of photos with this feature on ... I have no idea why, and frankly, I know the uses are gonna be pretty limited, but I'm just absofrigginlutely amazed that this little camera, about the size of a pack of smokes, can do this as well as a host of other way cool things I haven't figured out yet. I'm tempted to bring this little guy with me even when I bring the big SLR, so that I can fool around and take some quick candids and maybe some fun stuff like this "Color Accent" feature.

Geez, I'm a geek ...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ok, that IS pretty damn cool. I'm very jealous!

Ah, the Vic 20...good times, good times (the tapes!)