My Digital Cameras
Here are the digital cameras I've been using. I've acquired these over the years from here and there and so on. Not shown are my 35mm SLR film cameras. I haven't bothered with them in quite a while and probably won't until the weather warms up.
The first picture shows my Kodak EasyShare V530. This is a really neat little camera. The more I use it the more impressed I am with it. I do have a few quibbles against it though. One is that the battery is very temperature sensitive. I can leave it on the charge all night, go out in the cold to take pictures and by the time I get back to the house the charge is practically gone! The second thing I don't like is also one of the things I like about it and that is its size. It rather small, about 2 X 4 inches or so, which makes it very easy to carry around with me wherever I go. It also makes the buttons and settings very difficult to use or change when the temp is in double digits and the windchill is down below zero!
Here, shown in the next photo are my two Mavica FD73 cameras and my cheapie Wal-Mart camera. I like the Mavicas because they are much easier to handle and change the settings on as the picture taking environment changes. What I don't like is that you have to remove the battery in order to charge it. This necessitates having to go back reset the date/time and so, every time you have to recharge the batteries. Why I have two of them is a long story. It is related to my losing the charger for the first one (the one on the left). I'll not bother you with that story here. The one on the right is the newer one (at least to me) both work excellently and take great pictures. The older one does have a broken battery cover, hence the duct tape on it.
The little silver camera in the middle is the Wal-Mart cheapie. You should know that Wal-Mart is having a pre-Christmas push on these. They have a ton of them and big displays set-up in the aisle by the electronics department. At least the one here in town does. They are available for $19.95 each. Can't go wrong with that considering the price I suppose. But that's about all it has going for itself. It use this really dorky "PhotoShop Express" software to down load the photos you take and it takes a while to figure out how to navigate through all the "cutsie" stuff - add labels, make calendars, cards and so on, just to get the pictures in a directory on your computer. However, for twenty bucks you can put up with all that. The Mavicas and the Kodak are really easy, compared to the Wal-Mart. The Mavicas use 3.5" floppies. Just use the floppy like a you would a roll of film and when it's full you stick it in your computer and copy/paste off the disk into whatever directory you want.
The Kodak uses a SD memory chip (I'm using a 1G but they make bigger ones). The Kodak has this complicated (complicated to me since I've never used it) system using a docking port/station thingy and/or a special cable that plugs into a special Kodak Printer and ... I bought a SD/MMC USB Converter drive thingy and I just put the SD chip in that and then plug it into a USB port on my computer at which point it's as simple as using a flash drive. Here's a picture of it:
Its a pretty cool arrangement. When my sister gave me the Kodak all I got was the camera itself and the charger and nothing else. I downloaded the instruction manual off the web and printed it out and that has been big help. Then I went to Wal-Mart and bought the SD chip and the converter drive. It's worked pretty good since and all in all I'm pretty happy with it. The Mavicas a little more troublesome but that's only because my computer doesn't have a 3.5" Floppy drive. So I have to use my old laptop to transfer the pictures onto a flash drive and then to this computer. But that's the only hassle there is.
Well that'll be it for now. I'll be doing some more posting later this morning but right now I want to get some coffee and get this messy room cleaned up. The place looks terrible and it has finally reached my threshold of disgust. So until later ...
Take Care, Be Good and Don't Play in the Street!
posted by Steve Mule at 7:06 AM
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