Sunday, December 03, 2006

A new camera to capture fishing adventures

Seeing as my camera phone sucks and it would be difficult to explain to the wife that I ruined the family camera by dropping it in the water, I decided to look for a camera of my own.

I like Canon digital cameras and the ELPH series are small enough to carry easily in a shirt pocket so I looked at getting an older model off ebay. I figured I could get a quality used camera at a reasonable price. I settled on the 3 megapixel PowerShot S230 ELPH camera. A water-resitant or waterproof model would have been better but those seemed obviously a bit more expensive.

Anyways, the camera I decided to bid on was luckily being sold by someone in the next town so I contacted the seller who indicated I could pick it up rather than pay the $15 shipping cost since I was local. That gave me a $15 advantage over other bidders so I set my max bid at $80 and I won it later that day. I picked the camera up from the seller today.

Not a bad deal for a camera that 3 years ago sold for around $399. It came with two batteries, the charger, USB cables, manuals, and a 128MB CF card as well as a 32MB and a couple of 16MB CF cards that aren't all too useful.

I checked the camera and batteries out by snapping about 80 random photos around the house with the flash and it appeared to work fine. The 640x480 movie mode I took of the dog was pretty decent. This will be a bonus addition to catch those live action shots of fish burning drag, etc.

I'm pleased that my blog will now have better quality photos and possibly video and if I were to do something horrible to the camera, I'm not out $400. Cool.

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