Camera Shopping

I have no idea how but I seem to have lost my digital camera :-( Its last known sighting was Monday, June 20 and I have been looking for it since the same Friday. As of last Friday, which marked the end of 2 weeks of the search, I officially upgraded the status of the camera from 'misplaced' to 'lost'. It is a particularly bad time since Karthik is offering quite a few new photo ops almost everyday and grandma and grandpa back home are clamoring for new pics of him too. So I have started looking for a new digital camera.

I spent a lot of time on research when I bought my previous camera and finally settled on an A70. I absolutely loved it from the moment I took it out of the package from Amazon. The pictures were amazing with superb clarity, vivid colors and perfect brightness. I was particularly impressed with shots taken in low light and macro shots. It had an impressive array of manual controls like aperture, white balance, shutter speed, etc. (considering that it was a point-and-shoot camera) and so was perfect for the budding photographer in me. The Auto mode was perfect for spontaneous shots of Kavya while I could experiment with the manual controls for other shots. The only problem I had with it was a weird E18 error sometimes when shutting down but that never interfered when actually taking photographs.

So I have restricted myself to a Canon this time around to cut down on research time. My dream camera I guess would be the Powershot S2 IS. I was looking at the Powershot S1 IS even before and the S2 seems to have improved quite a bit on that. But at $499, the S2 is over the budget set for me (the budget's been set even lower than usual since I am deemed responsible for losing the old camera!). So over the weekend I have narrowed the field down to three candidates - the A510, the A520 and the A95.

At this point I am leaning towards the A510. It provides the same features that I came to love in my A70 - the low-light focus lamp, the extensive manual controls, a nice macro mode, the stitch feature, etc. It has also made an already good product better by being smaller, providing a 4x optical zoom and taking only 2 AA batteries. So I think I'll have a brand new camera in my hands by the end of this week. I'm just sad that I missed my annual tradition of the shaky, blurred shots of our local 4th of July fireworks show! Then again, the A510 has a preset 'fireworks' shooting mode. So maybe my shots next year won't be so bad after all...