Month: June 2005

Canon Powershot Pro 1

It has been clear for some time, but I haven’t found a good enough replacement yet. That may have changed today. Janet has been using a Digital Ixus 400 from Canon, and while it’s an awesome piece of work considering the size of the box it comes in, it lacks a “few” nice features such as a good zoom and support for external flash equipment.

Enter Canon Powershot Pro 1; whoa! What a nice piece of work this is. It’s not the latest of the greatest from Canon, on the contrary — but if you like photography, you can’t stop yourself from liking it 🙂 The only thing where Janet’s previous camera, the Ixus 400, is better than the Pro 1 is in the size department.

Pro 1 takes better pictures, has a better zoom, more pixels, connectivity with external equipment such as the SpeedLite flash from Canon, and more. Once of the nicest feature with the Pro 1 is the ability to zoom the focus point or “sweet spot” to allow for a better manual focus. The Pro 1 plays in a different league of course, and you can tell by the uh — price 🙂

Anyway, Janet likes it, that was the most important thing. She’s by no means as much of a geek as I am.

Joining the multimedia revolution

40 GB of HiFi media

I realize I’m a bit late, but I finally got around to getting myself a decent MP3-player.

It’s not the first one I’ve had, but the previous (and only other) one was a “bit” limited; a Diamond Rio player, with a whopping 128MB of memory. Although the Rio had more memory than my first computer, time has done to the Rio what time does to most technology.

I got the Zen Touch Extra (40GB) from Creative, and I’m very happy with it. It’s a bit heavier than those not based on a harddisk, but I can live with that. The number of songs it can hold, even at a decent quality like 256 or 320, is staggering and quite sufficient for any trip I’ll be making in the near future 🙂

Gigapixels next?

Is the analog world catching up to the digital world?

I’m not sure, but it feels like many digital camera manufacturers are trying to zero in on a large number of consumers who have now begun to replace their old compact cameras with the digital “minicam” or compact cameras. I’m talking about cameras like the Canon Ixus 400, Ixus 700, and so on.

What bothers me the most is not the fact that I can get a digital camera the size of my visa card (well, that’s a sales pitch I’ve heard) that gives me anywhere from three to seven megapixels; no, it’s the fact that most of these cameras still suck in the zoom department. Three times optical zoom just won’t cut it. You can, of course, never have too much zoom, but a 5-8 times optical zoom would sure be handy in a compact camera. And yes, before you say it, I realize this impacts the size of the camera. Well, they’ll just have to give their R&D crew some more money!

I’d also like to see more people stand up and raise a complaint or three about the use of the wording “digital zoom”. What kind of crap is that?! I wonder how many people have purchased a digital camera after having been told that “this baby has a three times optical zoom, and then to enhance the zoom even further, it sports a 12 times digital zoom” .. there ain’t no such thing! Sure.. if you have a 6-10 megapixel camera, you can “zoom” in once or twice and still maintain top notch quality, but hardly at three megapixels!

I’m still very happy with the 20D, and with my wife’s Ixus 400 for “party shots”.. all we gotta get now is the “in-between-model” 🙂