First, sorry I haven’t posted lately. Not much has been happening as of late since the last post. That being said, I finally got the call from Best Buy that said I could go and pick out a camera to replace the one that their repair facility failed to fix. Yesterday, I had my decision made on a Sony Cybershot; I wanted to get away from Fuji for a while, since my last two cameras were from them. However, I saw their newest (and I mean “new” as in “fresh-off-of-the-first-run-assembly-line-new”) offering sitting in their camera bar and it was much different than their other point-and-click cameras that I’ve owned.

This is a Fuji S2000HD camera. I literally went slack-jawed when I saw this thing. I had to confirm with the sales guys that it was new because I didn’t see it there when I window-shopped a month ago (believe me, I would have remembered it!). It’s so new that there are still no reviews on it anywhere, not even on Amazon.com. The first thing that caught my eye was the zoom numbers… 15x optical!!! That is almost unheard of in a under-$400 camera! Looking it over some more, the thing just screamed “feature laden!”. You can read all of the camera specs by clicking here. Like I said before, I’ve always been happy with Fuji’s picture quality, not to mention video as well (when my last camera worked right!), so this was really a no-brainer. It’s now the same price as my previous camera was about 4 years ago, so the replacement was still free. However, I had to get a new two-year warranty and a new camera bag; good luck trying to fit this li’l guy in my old camera pouch!

Yesterday, I spent my whole afternoon reading up on all the features. Some of them went right over my point-and-click-trained head. However, I’m not quite a stranger to manual settings, as I’ve gotten some of my best shots from experimenting manually. For now, I’ll show off some shots I did last night and this morning that I did after setting the overall settings and putting it on “Auto”.

(These images are hosted on Flickr.com. Click here to see the whole photoset with subtitles!)

Also, I wanted to do a quick video test with sound. That’s also the reason why my last camera went to repair. This camera actually shoots in QuickTime HD format, so I wanted to see the quality for myself. It can shoot video at resolutions up to 1280×720 (HD framed) at 30 fps. The video below was shot at the camera’s lowest resolution setting, 320×240, at 30 fps in MP4 (H264) format, then compressed in iMovie for the same resolution at 15 fps in MOV (H263) format.

I think it turned out rather well! By the way, excuse the messy bedroom.

All things considered, I think I’ll be glad to take this camera with me on the upcoming Germany trip. I didn’t want to rely on my phone’s camera to do all of the shutterbug work. And I’m happy that I’ll be able to shoot some video because, in some situations, it can say more than pictures can ever say!

My next blog entry will have a special treat for anyone here who follows the (mis)adventures of Thommen, our parrot companion. I’ll post it sometime this week, so keep visiting.

Cheers!

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Personal Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.