Saturday, February 28, 2004

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I finally bought a scanner. Visioneer 7100, $15 after rebate. Using it right now to scan some misc old photos. Keeping my fingers crossed. 11:25:45 PM    comment []

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Fast SD Cards, Burst Mode My new camera (see post immediately below) comes with a pathetic 16 Mb starter SD card. I've been holding off on buying an SD with real capacity, just to give myself a chance to experiment and research. I'm glad I did. Research suggests one of the new "ultra" SDs, which don't seem to cost much more than standard. I was going to go 256 MB, ~140 full-res photos seemed like enough. But with my little bit of experimenting, I am starting to reconsider. I am finding the burst mode (4-7 shots in 1.5 seconds) addicitve. For any non-posed shot, and maybe even posed ones, it seems to work very nicely. You can actually have a good chance at getting the birthday candles just as they are going out, for example. Even in a posed shot, if your subject blinks, you also get a shot where they weren't blinking. And while the extra shots will eventually be deleted, in the short-term the card is filling up 4-5X as fast as one at a time! 10:10:59 PM    comment []

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New Digital Camera I'm having lots of fun with my new toy, a Lumix (Panasonic) DMC-FZ10. 4 megapixels, but the killer features are: 12X optical zoom, optical image stabilization, very good Leica lens, and shutter like a 35 mm SLR, not like a typical digicam. I've wanted "ultra-zoom" more zoom capability almost form the moment I bought our first digicam, a Nixon Coolpix 2500, 18 months ago (it has 3X optical). But it has only been fairly recently that there was much in that market. Ditto for low shutter lag, once I discovered how poor it is on a consumer digital camera. The optical image stabilization was something I hadn't thought about, till I started to do serious research for this purchase. I've had it on camcorders for over a decade, but it has only slowly started to migrate to digicams, trailing ultra-zoom by maybe six months. With the ultra-zoom, it makes a BIG difference, pretty much a must-have. There are lots of other cool features--including manual controls, which I don't even really know how to use. It's pretty big, almost as big as an SLR. But we still have the Coolpix for pocketability. 10:02:46 PM    comment []