Digital cameras

Warning — geeky digital camera topic...
I've added a new digital camera to my collection. I now have a Kodak that goes back to 2001, a Canon that I got in January 2002, another Canon I bought in 2005, and now a brand new Panasonic. This probably seems a little excessive, but as you know I spend a good amount of my free time taking, processing, and posting pictures. And remember, all my time is free time these days! Such are the joys of unemploym... er, retirement.

The Canon Pro90 IS compared to the Panasonic TZ3 — both

cameras have a 10x zoom and an image stabilization feature.

The new Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3 is a replacement for a monster of an Canon camera that has served me well but now seems much too heavy to haul around much. The 2001-vintage Canon Pro90 IS weighs 24 oz. — 1½ lbs. — whereas the TZ3 weighs just 8 oz. Both cameras have a 10x zoom, and both have an image stabilization feature that makes it possible to take sharp telephoto pictures without having to use a tripod.

There is a great difference in the size of the LCD screens on
the two cameras. The Canon Pro90 has an electronic viewfinder
that I like a lot, while the Panasonic has no viewfinder at all.

As usual, there are a lot of trade-offs. The Canon Pro90 has a lens that extends to 370 mm, while the TZ3 only goes up to
280 mm. That means I won't get the same long shots as before, unless the "extended optical zoom" feature of the new camera works well. I haven't tried it yet. But I won't have to carry around what is the equivalent of a paving stone to take good pictures. And it's not like I'm getting rid of the Canon Pro90. As long as its batteries will continue recharging, I'll have use of it.

The Panasonic camera will probably also replace the other Canon camera I have, which is a Powershot S70 that I bought in November 2005. I've never been happy with the S70, and I think it's because it doesn't have an image stabilization feature. I get far too many blurry pictures when I use it in low-light situations. Its strong point, and it's a very strong one, is its macro feature, which lets me take great close-up shots when the light is good and bright.

The Panasonic TZ3 (silver) is not really any bigger than the Canon
S70 (black), but it has a much longer zoom and image stabilization.

The Canon S70 has an optical viewfinder, but I almost never use it. Instead, I compose my pictures using the LCD screen. That's why I think I can live with the Panasonic camera, which doesn't have any viewfinder at all — as long as the battery doesn't get drained too quickly by the big screen. Only time and using the camera will tell me that story.

The LCD screen on the Canon S70 is much smaller
than the Panasonic TZ3's big screen.

Both the S70 and the TZ3 have good wide-angle capabilities. The lens range is 28 mm at the lower end. The S70 has a 3.6x zoom, taking it up to 100 mm at the higher end, while the TZ3 has its much better 10x/280 mm capabilities. Unless the TZ3's macro feature is pretty lame, I probably won't use the S70 much any more.

What's the price on all this? Well, I paid about $700 for the Pro90 in late 2001, $400 for the S70 in late 2005, and now a little less than $300 for the new Panasonic. These are my splurges. I hardly ever go to restaurants, I don't travel much any more, I don't buy clothes (as anybody who knows me will tell you), and I drive a tiny seven-year-old Peugeot.

One of the things I didn't want to do was buy a digital camera that used a different memory card from my other cameras, which take the big old Compact Flash cards. I have eight or ten of those old cards, in different capacities.

The TZ3 uses the newer, smaller Secure Digital (SD) cards. I thought buying one of those with sufficient capacity would add a lot to the cost of a new camera. But when I went on Amazon to see, I found I could get a 2 GB card like I wanted for ... get this ... $15.00. Even with shipping, the card, which has twice the capacity of any other memory card I have, cost less than $22.00. How could I resist that?

I bought both the new camera and the new card from Amazon in the U.S. and had them shipped to my mother in North Carolina. She then shipped them to me in France (the package took only five days to make it across the Atlantic!). Buying the same two items here, with the low dollar and the high French value-added tax (about 20%) would have cost at least twice as much.

I haven't mentioned my oldest digital camera, which is a 2000-vintage Kodak DC4800 that cost me about $400 back then. Until now, it has been the camera I use in the kitchen to take close-ups of all the food we make. It has a small screen, a 3x optical zoom, and an optical viewfinder. It has been a great camera.

The Kodak is going into retirement.

The problem with the old Kodak is that it is now very creaky. The batteries I have for it won't hold a charge for very long, and I don't really want to buy any new ones now. One advantage of the Kodak camera is that you can run it off a wall outlet, so you don't even need a battery to use it in the kitchen the way I do. But now the socket that the power cord plugs into on the camera itself is loose, making the electrical connection bad. I don't think there's anything I can do about that, so the Kodak is going into retirement.

Oh, I haven't mentioned megapixels. I'm not a megapixel believer, and certainly not a fanatic. For my purposes, 3-megapixel pictures are plenty big, and I have to reduce those in size for my blog anyway. I don't print many pictures, especially not at large sizes, and I guess having mega-megapixel pictures is good for that.

The Kodak takes pictures at 3 megapixels and the Canon Pro90 at 2.5 megapixels. The newer Canon S70 and the Panasonic TZ3 both can take 7-megapixel photos, but I set them to about 3 megapixels for my purposes.

By the way the TZ in the Panasonic TZ3 name stands for "Travel Zoom." The camera is designed to meet the needs of travelers, I guess. I hope it meets mine.