New Camera
I decided to get a new camera. After the demise of my original Canon, I bought and used a Pentax for just over a year or so. The Pentax was nice, in that it was very small, but it had three problems that really bothered me:
- The macro lens mode wasn't very good. One of the things I really enjoy most with my camera is taking photos of flowers up close. My Pentax wouldn't focus in on them unless I was 18 inches away, which is too far for what I want to do.
- The photo start-up and taking time was too slow. The camera took too much time from power-up or from picture to picture to capture those elusive smiles on Eddie. You would have to hold the button down for literally 3 seconds before the photo would take. I think it was because of all the auto-focus processes, but it was slow enough that I'd have to explain that to strangers when asking to get our photo taken by them. If you didn't hold the shutter button down long enough, the photo would never take.
- The camera was too noisy in low light situations. Many of our photos are indoors, and there were lots of flecks of purple, red and blue in the images taken in low light. Starry nighttime sky pictures like I once obtained on my Canon were never possible.
Now, I wasn't intending to buy a new camera, but I saw the review for the Lumix on Boing Boing, and thought, "Hey, that looks nice."
Then, when my parents came to visit, they showed up with a Lumix camera! We took it to Mount Vernon, and I was suddenly hooked. This was a very nice camera. Plus, the video from the Lumix is much crisper and doesn't use the DIVX format, which means it's more directly compatible on my Windows machines.
Incidentally, after all the research I put into buying a camera, including this nice little test-drive I was able to do, the reason my mother bought this camera? Because it was red and it matched her camera case.
