New Camera

So we pulled the trigger on a new (old) camera.  We’re the proud new owners of a Nikon Coolpix 5700 digital camera.  We don’t have it in our hands, but we bought it on eBay yesterday and paid for it.  It should be arriving in a week or so.  It’s a 5 megapixel model so many may sneer at it, what with the current standard being 10 or 12 mp and all…but I say that’s just megapixel snobbery.  The pictures I’ve seen from it are amazing, and it’s got Nikon lenses and internals, so the quality it packs into the images is really high.  I look at it this way:  we have a pair of 1 megapixel cameras: a Fujifilm and a Vivitar.  The Vivitar is a K-mart cheapie and takes underexposed, off-color, grainy pictures.  The Fujifilm was in the bargain bin at Staples and takes wonderfully exposed, clear pictures that just happen to max out at 1280×960 (or something like that) resolution.  It’s all about the optics.  I’d rather have a digital camera from a company known for making cameras than from a company known for making electronics…Nikon vs. Sony…Canon vs. Samsung.

I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it, anyway.  We just have to get a Compact Flash card.  And maybe an internal card-reader for the computer…and a USB2.0 card to plug into a PCI slot…

Well, That’s Another Day In The Can

And so this was Monday.  (Say that to the tune of John Lennon’s “And So This Is Christmas” and you get the effect…)  Monday…it’s a workday.  Yawn.  My workload today was so low that I spent lots of the day trying to find a freeware program that would interpret the .RAW files on my cheapie Philips 3.0 megapixel digital camera.  It has a built-in .RAW-to-.JPG converter program, but it really takes pictures for crap in most conditions so I thought if I was able to manipulate the .RAW data directly that I’d uncover some lost Ark of the Covenant full of great picture data.  So I tried The Gimp, and Pixmantec Rawshooter, but found that the latter doesn’t recognize pics from my camera, which under the skin is a “SMaL Technologies” camera.  I also tried the UFRaw plugin for Gimp which also didn’t read my camera’s format of .RAW files.  Finally I hit Stepok’s Raw Converter and found a program which could read the .RAW files from my little camera and let me manipulate the CCD data.

And it was crappy.  The colors were washed out, the pictures looked terrible, and the built-in RAW-to-JPG converter did a much better job than the labor-intensive manual way.  Sigh…

But, going on with more digital camera goodness… Remember I said that my wife dropped our digital camera on the kitchen floor on Saturday and the camera was horked up?  Well, we’re canvassing eBay for a new camera.  When I say “new,” of course, I mean a camera that was new a couple of years ago, and cost several hundred dollars a couple of years ago, but will cost us MUCH less today and still be a top-of-the-line-back-in-the-day model of camera.  We’re looking at the Nikon Coolpix 5700, Canon S3 IS, Canon S2 IS, Panasonic Lumix FZ20 and Fuji Finepix S7000.  All should be WAYYY better than the point’n shoot GE camera that my dad gave my wife for her birthday a year ago, and about the same price as going to Whale Mart and getting a new cheapie point’n shoot.