[SGVLUG] Camera recommendations?

[Terry Hancock]

On Monday 26 September 2005 09:01 pm, Dustin wrote:
> date--anyone have a recommendation for a good, relatively cheap portable 
> camera?
> 
> The thing I found most annoying about the old one was the shutter delay
> (the kid always moves before you get the picture), but I gather that
> doesn't go away until you spend the big bucks for digital SLR.  Since that
> would pretty much decimate the laptop fund, I'm not doing that, but
> inexpensive ones with less than usual delay would be nice.

You neglected to mention whether you wanted a digital camera or not,
but I'll assume so from the context. ;-)

I haven't been in the market for sometime, but I've been very happy
with my Canon PowerShot A60.  I'm sure these are probably available
second-hand by now.  I doubt it'd be much of an improvement over your
old one, but it's very serviceable:

* Still JPG images and AVI video (limited only by the memory on the
  memory device).

* Uses CompactFlash -- I've been using the same 256 MB CF since I bought it.
  I think you can get these up to 1 GB or more now.

* Says "2.0 megapixel", I think that translates to something like 1600x1200 (?)
  Has lower resolutions, of course.

* Flash can be controlled to manual -- has mechanical controls (not pesky menus).
  Can do long-exposure (manual shutter control), automatic control up to (IIRC)
  1 minute (took some nice photos of a night lightning storm this way).

* 3:1 *optical* zoom (the only kind worth messing with -- assuming you know
  how to crop images on your computer).

* Color LCD viewer shows you what the camera sees, also has an optical viewfinder.

If you want a more up to date camera, I'd probably try to see what
the current one is in the Canon PowerShot family, to see if it's
similar to this.  All in all, a nice little camera.

Don't bother trying to use it with gphoto -- just get a USB CF reader,
and you're all set (actually they have these 12-in-1 on the market
nowadays -- uses the usb-storage kernel module, works as delivered
on Debian Sarge 3.1 (current stable)).

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com