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Time for a new digital camera

Posted on August 19, 2006 by Jeremy Toeman

Cameras!Well folks, I’ve given up on the Swedes. While a few Canon cameras did show up on their official lost and found Web site, none are mine.  I have given up and am moving on.  I’m grumpy (I couldn’t even take pictures while hanging out with cool folks like Robert Scoble and meeting Mike Arrington at the TechCrunch7 party last night – although Thomas Hawk caught a picture of me!), but I’m moving on. 

After looking around briefly, I narrowed down quite quickly to Canon, Panasonic, and Sony for my choices.  Why these three?  Well, I don’t know much about digital cameras myself, but I do know a few people who do, and these are the three brands they all own.  Might sound simplistic, but it works for me. 

I am eliminating Sony from the list even though I have a Memory Stick slot in my laptop, I prefer to use SD cards as my wife‘s laptop (Dell Inspiron 700m) has SD built-in, as does her Treo 700w and our Garmin Nuvi 350, etc.  Bottom line: I want to use SD.  Also, at $36 for a 2GB SanDisk card, it’s hard to argue!

PannyRich (my boss at Sling Media) uses a Panasonic, and Dave Mathews (another coworker) likes them as well.  I played with Rich’s camera (Panasonic Lumix) and the picture quality was pretty impressive, but I really didn’t like the user interface, on-screen menus, or button layout all that much.  Maybe I fear change, I’m not sure, but I just didn’t like the ‘feel’ of using it.  This pushed me towards Canon.

A single visit to Amazon sealed the deal.  Why, you may ask?  I took a look at the top sellers at Amazon and at the time of writing, they are ALL from Canon.  Not some, not a few, not most, but ALL.  And while I may not agree with “popularity wins” as my reasoning (seen Titanic?), there’s a certain point where you have to assume all these folks know what they are talking about.  Not only that, two of my best friends and my CEO just got Canons in the past month.  I smell a winner.

Canon SD700

With the variety to choose from, I quickly narrowed my choices down to the SD450, SD630, and SD700.  The 450 was the one I ‘thought’ I wanted, as the price wasn’t bad, and has a nice feature set.  But with a little more investigation, I decided I’d plunk down the extra $100 to get the latest and greatest.  The biggest additional feature to the 700 is the image stabilization technology, which looks like it’s probably becoming a standard feature on most new models.  That, plus the amazing customer reviews on Amazon for the SD700 was pretty much all I needed.  A final check at DPreview sealed the deal (although it looks like I may need to pick up an extra battery).

Full review to come after it arrives, assuming I don’t go to Sweden again…

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Posted in General | 4 Comments
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4 thoughts on “Time for a new digital camera”

  1. Thomas Hawk says:
    August 19, 2006 at 8:55 pm

    Hey Jeremy, good meeting you last night. I don’t think you’ll go wrong with a Canon, but for point and shoots you might want to check out the Fuji’s as well. They actually have some pretty good color technology in my opinon of course.

    Of course the real jump up would be to a DSLR and then you either go Canon or Nikon but that’s a bigger investment and it’s a rare bird (odd ducks like me) who like to carry those big beasts around.

    I’ll have to try and figure the Slingbox thing out again at some point. Let me know when you guys have one that will allow my Cat6 cable to go in and then another to go out to hook back into the Media Center PC in my living room that I need internet access for.

    Best,

    Tom

    Reply
  2. tivoboy says:
    August 20, 2006 at 7:26 am

    yes, the sd700is is very good. I have had the sd450, sd550, bought the 630 took it back and got the sd700. I read all the dpreview reviews, and actually thought I wouldn’t like it, but I do. I don’t find any of the corner softness areas that some have posted about. Maybe I just got a good copy. the IS is nice, and the ISO performance is decent. Only decent, above ISO 400, I wouldn’t shoot with it.

    You should be able to pick one up for about 370$ shipped, they have come down in the past two months.

    when you go SLR, I would still go canon. The high ISO performance just rocks, but camera bodies and lenses are one of the most subjective decsions out there.

    Reply
  3. tivoboy says:
    August 20, 2006 at 7:36 am

    was that party up at Quadrus? I saw some of the august boys.
    and you were 30 seconds from my house!

    Reply
  4. Thomas Hawk says:
    August 22, 2006 at 5:42 am

    Hey Jeremy, you might like the shirt that Robert Scoble was wearing when we did a shoot last night down at the Golden Gate Bridge in SF.

    http://beta.zooomr.com/smartsets/thomashawk/1913

    Reply

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Jeremy Toeman is a seasoned Product leader with over 20 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, smart TV and consumer technology. Prior ventures and projects include CNET, Viggle/Dijit/Nextguide, Sling Media, VUDU, Clicker, DivX, Rovi, Mediabolic, Boxee, and many other consumer technology companies. This blog represents his personal opinion and outlook on things.

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