Hugo’s blog

My faithful PowerShot S30 suffered one too many falls last week. It was far from being the worst that it had seen, but this time, the button is broken. It still kind-of works (bye bye pre-focus as the shutter release lost its half-pressed capability), but who knows how long it will take for the button to stop working completely.

So it’s this time again where I get overwhelmed by the too many options there are in terms of cameras. More than picking a particular model, I have found 3 formats that are attractive:

• Ultra-slim: the Casio Exilim Z750 is very slim and fast; unfortunately, it seems that you need a dock to charge or download pictures, though.Jonathan is always raving about it and pointed out that with an SD card reader and thanks to the great battery, it’s not so much of a problem. It doesn’t have an orientation sensor, but rotating picture by hand is not terrible. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1 is also a possibility, with its cool 16:9 CCD, but the pictures it takes seem fairly noisy.
• Compact: the Canon PowerShot S80 seems to be really cool; slightly bigger, slightly slower, but seems to have lots of cool features and manual settings, and a wide-angle lens; I have my doubts about the thumb-operated zooming button though.
• Big zoom: the Panasonic DMC-FZ5 has good features including a 12x zoom; it just is bigger. The Kodak EasyShare P880 has a 5.8x zoom and seems good too, as well as the Kodak EasyShare P850 with its 12x zoom.

I need to look at this a little closer.

Comments on any of those more than welcome.