Lessons in digital cameras

I think it was late 2002 or early 2003 when I picked up my Canon Elph camera. It was 4 million pixels, had a rechargeable battery, used CF cards and was generally pretty small. The screen was a little small too, but at the time that was generally the best you could do. It cost $400.

It had generally served me well, and was a lot easier to deal with than the old Nikon I had. It nearly died when the screen broke, and I mostly repaired it. Of course, it developed a pink streaking problem after that too, which appears to be mechanical (perhaps from the extra parts left when I put it back together).

The thing I learned about the Elph series is that they're small and generally let you just turn it on and shoot. What I don't like is that as an able-bodied photographer, was that I couldn't just pop things into manual and go at it. Night time stuff was one example of where it was an issue. Another was in situations like the Blue Man Group shows. I had to "trick" the camera by allowing it to flash, and therefore expose it at a reasonable shutter speed even though it was dark. If I had control, I could set it into shutter priority and make it capture whatever it could see.

So I decided it was time to replace the Elph, in part because the pink streak thing was annoying me. This time though, I had no desire to spend a ton of money on it. Cameras you carry in your pocket get beat up a lot for one thing. And if I'm that worried about getting things perfect, I'll bust out the SLR. The flip side, though, is that the little camera likely captures more moments than the SLR.

I like the UI and controls of the Canons, so I wanted to stay with them. Of course I looked at the G series first. The G7 is basically an SLR in a small package. It's a great camera, though expensive. It even has a small lithium-ion battery. It's very much full-featured. The only thing I can criticize is that the grip is really small. Oh, and it's $500!

The A series cameras have lots of flexibility, and honestly have a much better value proposition. The one I settled on was the A710 IS. At only $250, half the price of the G7, the feature set makes it very compelling even over the G7. It uses two batteries (some use four), it's 7 million pixels (some use more), it allows you to do full manual, and it has a 6x zoom with image stabilization. I'm looking forward to playing with it this weekend and see if I can pull off some sharp night-time stuff. I might have to bust out the mini tripod! It's a little bigger than the Elph, but not horribly.

And have you seen that 2GB SD cards are like $20 now, even for the faster throughput ones?