Quote:
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Originally Posted by Jebediah
What happened to your other 4 cameras?
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They got old!
Number one was acquired very cheaply from ubid.com, which used to be a good place to dumpster-dive for last year's model. It was a
Polaroid model that, with a top resolution of 640x480, qualifies as little more than a toy by today's standards. But it was well worth the price and was handy to have around and experiment with.
The second was also a ubid special. The
Olympus D-460Z is a nice little camera for what it is. With several white balance options and three ISO levels, it's more flexible than the average low-end point & shoot digital of its day, and 1.3 megapixel resolution gave quite nice standard sized prints. (No enlargements, though.)
I fell in love with the third one, the
Nikon Coolpix 995, after I tried out my boss's. Although this camera has many of the problems of point & shoot digitals (especially shutter lag), it allows as much or as little manual control over the shutter, aperture, white balance, and ISO sensitivity as you want, and gives limited options for some extra lenses and external flash. It was therefore a good choice for someone who learned on the completely manual Pentax K1000 35mm SLR.
That one came used from B&H Photo in New York. The only one that I bought new was number four, the Nikon D50 mentioned earlier, which I had been drooling over since it came out last year.. "I probably shouldn't have," but Best Buy tempted me with a pre-thanksgiving sale and I bit. Unlike most point & shoot digitals (even good ones), the autofocus is lightning fast, and the shutter lag is practically nonexistent. It's just great. I love it.
The Polaroid is not really usable because the battery door became so loose it wouldn't keep the batteries in contact, but I still have it around somewhere. The Olympus is quite servicable and is now doing teaching duty for the munchkins to use until such time as they develop enough skill to justify something nicer. And the 995 is still a nice choice for Mrs. Dallas, who is completely uninterested in all the manual photo geekery that makes me all verklempt, or for me when I'm going to be in an environment where I don't want to carry the D50.
(By the way, for newer Dwellars, my 995 led a very sheltered, nay, cloistered existence. NothingButNet had the same model; his suffered an untimely demise but, I dare say, had more fun than mine did before it went to its reward. Look through the Quality Images forum for some examples.)