As previously discussed, I'm not taking my laptop with me because it is heavy and I know I would spend all my time worrying about it getting stolen or damaged. However, contrary to previously discussed, I did decide to purchase a new camera (though it may be getting exchanged).
I purchased this beaut from Amazon right before the price decreased by over $50. I can not begin to tell you how much that irks me, or how much I really just want my old camera back. This is the newer model but...
- It feels very light, too light for me. I'm not saying I want a heavy DSLR (because I have no idea how to use one), I just want to believe it won't crack the casing if I set it on the tabletop to roughly.
- Touch screen. Yes I have and love my smartphone with a touch screen but I have it in my mind that cameras are fragile, and this design does nothing to assuage my fears that the screen will get scratched and I won't be able to see what I'm taking a picture of. Plus if you accidentally touch the screen it could do all sorts of nonsense like zoom, focus on an area other than what you want in focus, or even take the picture prematurely. I've figured out how to turn off some of those features but others are still plaguing me.
- There is nothing to keep you from overzooming. Quick digital photography lesson: Your optical zoom is what actually uses the lenses to make you appear closer to the object. Digital zoom, on the other hand, simply enlarges the pixels in your picture to make it look like you got even closer but sacrifices clarity in the process. My old camera would pause when it maxed out the optical zoom so that you had to deliberately use digital zoom if that's what you wanted (which I never did). This camera just zips right to the max digital zoom.
PROs
- It's a very pretty camera and for some reason the red version is far cheaper than the other colors.
- The touchscreen is large and very responsive. If you like to control all your pictures the same way you do on an iPhone, this is very similar.
- It's menus are far more intuitive than my old camera and it's very easy to change the settings. Switching to video is as simple as pressing a button on the top (but an indented button, so you won't accidentally trigger it. You can get a burst of photos without having to spin any knobs around to change the setting.
- It will support an SDXC card, letting you store hours of video and thousands of pictures at the same time.
- I've always liked Panasonic's stand alone battery chargers. You don't have to plug the phone into the wall, and who wants to steal a random battery that isn't even compatible with most other cameras? You also don't have to lug around several AA or AAA batteries, which is a plus when traveling.
- It's very light, as I stated previously.
- It produces pictures with up to 14MP and 16x optical zoom.
All in all, a good camera, but I'm not feeling it.
To go along with it I purchased a 16GB Eye-Fi SD card.
The draw of the Eye-Fi card is that it wirelessly uploads your pictures to your computer, mobile phone, and social networking sites like Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa.
The drawback is that it is sloooooow.
It would take a minute or more to upload one picture over my relatively fast and reliable home WiFi so I'm wary of taking it to a place that may or may not have shoddy WiFi. Plus, after purchasing it I found out that you have to manually inform the program each WiFi connection you want it to use, in advance. If you want to be able to use HotSpots, you have to pay an annual fee. Suddenly this was not the thrifty endeavor I sought.
So now I am back to square one. Basically camera-less and wondering how I will easily and quickly transfer photos to Picasa (my photosharing site of choice). At the moment an iPad mini is looking like a nice option because not only does Apple have an adapter for the lightning port that will read SD cards, but I would also be able to blog in the absence of a computer without typing only using my thumbs. Still portable and 1/3 the cost of my laptop. The problem is I'd have to buy half a dozen accessories to make it what I want.
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| $466.00 That's worth it....right? |
Anyone have any experience traveling with the iPad mini? I'm all ears!
