Re: thoughts on new Canon compacts?

"Mike Henley" <casioculture@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
So I prefer AA's in everything partly because it means
fewer chargers.

Recharging is no issue for me, the camera is the recharger. If the
camera comes with a cradle, you just put the cradle next to the
computer and put the camera on it and it recharges. Easier than AA,
battery never leaves the camera, doesn't get any easier than that.

I'm not sure what cameras charge batteries internally these days,
and there's still presumably an AC adapter (i.e. charger) involved.
Or the cradle, that's a charger, another thing to drag around.

Charging the other two batteries, though I rarely ever needed to use
them, is just simply a matter of seconds, literally seconds, opening
the camera, swapping the battery, that's it.

I'm usually not cramped for seconds when changing batteries. If
spending 10 seconds instead of 2 seconds changing batteries means
I can get rid of a charger, I can spare the extra 8 seconds.

As for travelling, my personal experience taught me that it's better to
have a different camera for that. ... When I travel I'll buy one
specifically for the trip, based on the needs of the trip, and perhaps
put it on ebay on my return.

I travel enough that I like having a suitable camera for it.

I used to have that mindset too that it's better to have AA batteries
in case it's difficult to find batteries for the camera in the future,
but the reality is that the batteries last for a long enough time, long
enough that I'm more likely replace the camera before I need to replace
them.

I'm not too worried about it being -difficult- to find batteries, but
even if they're easy to find, having to buy them online is much more
hassle than just reaching into my box full of AA's.

As for ebay, I don't know what hassle you had to deal with, but
I think if you're careful enough to buy only from people with high
feedback score over a large volume of deals then its' a great resource.

I'm not so concerned about getting ripped off or anything like that--
my transactions have generally worked out fine. The hassle is 1)
finding the item I want from N different dealers, comparing the prices
and shipping charges from each one, checking for subtle differences
between similar items to see which one seems the best, placing the
order, paying shipping charges that are often often as much as the
battery itself costs, waiting for the item to arrive (which means it
uses space in my mental "pending" list for several days), picking it
up at my mail drop, disposing of packaging material including
shredding anything that might point to my credit card number, testing
the battery over several charge cycles to make sure it works, etc.
Again, this is as compared to just reaching into my existing box full
of AA's, or picking up additional AA's at the store the next time I
happen to be there (or ordering a big supply of them online so the
shipping charge is small by comparison), and dropping them into the
Lacrosse charger which conditions them and displays their measured
capacity on an LCD screen so I immediately know if I got any duds.

Ebay gave me the chance to buy, try, and sell many cameras that I
wouldn't have been able to do so had it not existed.

I have enough cameras by now, I want to get around to selling some but
I want to be pretty much through buying them for a while. I used a
Canon S100 for 5+ years and was very happy with it (except for lithium
ion related nuisance) until it had an unfortunate accident, thus the
hunt for a replacement.

I'm slightly tempted to replace my F810 with perhaps the Canon A610 for
the SD card and AA batteries, but I look at its images and then I'm not
impressed; there's something about them that screams "budget" or "P&S"
and there's no RAW format output.
http://www.pbase.com/cameras/canon/powershot_a610

I don't think RAW is important in this class of camera. I'm not sure
what to compare those images to--they mostly look ok to me. Are the
F810's images better?
.

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