Here where the lens is wide

[austin_dern]

Oh, so, something of a prequel to Anthrohio and which makes a good buffer between the Saturday and the Sunday reports. My camera, nearly four years old, has got broken a bit. The battery door snapped off when we were at Conneaut Lake Park in October, and while I glued it back together, that fix snapped again during Motor City Fur[ry] Con. And then some bit of dirt got into the sensor during Pinball At The Zoo. I pointed out the spot in a few pictures shared recently. So I had the chance to ponder whether to get a $200 camera fixed and if so where.

And then I happened to be in Meijer's and looked over their cameras. They had a bunch on clearance. I found a couple that looked almost perfect for me, in that they were the kind of semi-professional cameras that let you set exposure times and f-stops and the like. And then I went and blew it by doing so much research about whether this half-off camera might be any good that all the local Meijer's sold out of it.

But there was another camera. And that one they did have at a few stores left. And I got into a should-I-really-get-this research deathspiral before I came to my senses. Those senses were: this is a digital camera with 21x optical zoom, with manually-settable f-stop and exposure lengths and simulated ISO up to 6400. And it hasn't got a spot of something on the sensor. So, the night before we went off to Anthrohio, as I got back from dropping our pet rabbit off at bunny_hugger's parents', I stopped in and bought one. For me, this counts as an impulse buy.

So running through all my picture-taking at Anthrohio was my uncertainty that I was using a brand-new camera right. I left the camera on Auto mode for pretty much everything and hoped it would all be none too bad. And I'm still getting used to a couple little things. The major one is that the view screen is also a touch screen, and I'm still learning how to not accidentally start a round of setting-fiddling. But the important thing is I got a camera far better than the one I'd had and for the price of a consumer point-and-shoot so I shouldn't feel like I did something wrong buying it.

Trivia: New York City's first railroad, the New York and Harlem, was chartered the 22nd of December, 1831. Its first trains were mule-pulled, then horse-pulled, before locomotives were used. Source: The Epic Of New York City, Edward Robb Ellis.

Currently Reading: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America, John M Barry.

Comments

[moxie_man]

Most electronics today are "dumpster ready", so you would have wasted your time trying to find someplace to repair the old one. As such, you made the right decision to buy a replacement. Hope it works out for you.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it did strike me the cost of getting the camera fixed would be pretty near the replacement cost. Especially for a camera that, while very nicely small and generally well-behaved, doesn't have any really great hard-to-replace features.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Above all, what counts on a camera is the physical size of the photosites. Modern processing can counter a lot, as demonstrated by leading phone cameras, but - ultimately, there are only so many photons in a given scene, and a small sensor & lens can only capture much fewer than something with a larger sensor. Inevitably, larger sensors mean larger, heavier, and more expensive lenses - though that's all relative. The newer version of my mainstay, using a Fresnel element, cuts the weight and length by about half, and adds optical stabilisation.

At this point, even the most humble DSLR is capable of superb results, as the roomie will attest, having recently gone from a Panasonic P&S to a D5500, even with just the kit lens, let alone something like my Sigma 30mm f/1.4, where you can achieve beautifully shallow depth of field in virtually no light, bought used for a pleasantly modest price.

Do try a DSLR sometime. I'm not understating that there's quite a significant difference in quality, at not much more cost, if any, especially used.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm not one to mistake a phone camera for a real camera. A phone (or iPod, in my case) camera might be fine for don't-have-a-real-camera situation, or for things that need to be photographed but don't actually matter, as with our pinball selfie league scores. But for anything that's to be presentable I will use a real camera. Even my former point-and-shoot camera did better than my iPod.

bunny_hugger does have a DSLR, and does wonderful work with it. I don't know if you've seen her flickr account. They're worth seeing.

I've shied away from making the investment in that, although not for very good reasons. Well, maybe because a lot of what I photograph is pinball nights and amusement parks, and a DSLR is harder to take on a ride. The semipro camera I've got fits in my pocket, which is so valuable.

And I used to have a semipro camera that had an adaptor ring, to fit on stuff like a wide-angle lens. I got that in Singapore in 2003 and only replaced it when it finally gave up in 2012 (!) which I suppose is a digital camera record I'll never match. The lens and stuff are in principle usable with bunny_hugger's camera, once we get an adaptor for that. We haven't yet but keep meaning to.