Sunday’s

So I had a number of things that I wanted to get done this weekend before the long weekend. What I didn’t take into account was that some small businesses still close on Sunday’s. I don’t begrudge them their day off but I think if I had a shop, I would close on Monday or some other day during the week. So I never got my boots repaired, my glasses fixed, nor my hair cut. Two of those three need to be done soon. I’m guessing you can figure out which.

On the other hand, I did get a number of other things accomplished. I think I now have almost everything I need for my trip to Germany this summer. One of my purchases was a new toy. I bought a new camera. I already own a point-n-shoot digital, it’s an Olympus C-5500 Sport Zoom. The thing takes pretty good pictures but it’s the slowest camera that I have ever used. If you are setting up your shot, it’s fine. If you are doing candid photography, it sucks royally. By the time the damn thing has finished screwing around trying to focus, you’ve lost your shot. So I bought one of the fastest cameras I could find, the Canon PowerShot SD870IS. So far the only issue I have is that many reds are a little over saturated. I need to do some experimenting but I’ve seen this with other Canon point-n-shoots. When you take away all the gimmicky options that Canon offers on their cameras, they don’t have many point-n-shoots that are of a better quality. The reason I didn’t go for something like the PowerShot G9 is size. If I was going to get a high end camera that’s somewhat bulky, I would just buy myself an SLR. I can stick the 870 in a pocket and not really notice it’s there. That was a huge requirement for me. Where I am going to be in Germany, I have to carry anything valuable on me at all times. Bulky and heavy would become a nuisance that would detract from my trip.

I have noticed one thing that I might go back to the shop and talk to them about. Canon now has a touch sensitive round switch. It offers quick access to some basics and it’s the cursor control inside of the menu system. The touch sensitive part is supposed to allow it to act as a rotary dial to quickly scroll through menu choices. It doesn’t seem to work to any usable degree. I don’t know if the capacitance switches in the body aren’t working correctly on my camera or if it just doesn’t work well period. Not a deal breaker for me as I didn’t even know about the capability until I read about it in the manual. Still annoying when a feature doesn’t work as designed.