Okay, things are heating up here in my neighbourhood. We've got a new recycling system. The construction is going to start up again next week (way to waste 7 weeks of prime work time whoever is managing this job). I'm going to be doing some landscaping in my backyard. All this will be reported on, so hang on to your hat folks.
In the meantime, one thing that is really killing me in getting this blog out is my lack of an efficient digital camera. They seem to be getting cheaper and cheaper, but camera producers seem to be tripping over themselves to get as high resolution as possible. Why? Does anybody but a pro really need 12 megapixels? It's retarded, but people are stupid and so are the companies that cater to their stupidity ("Too many cameras, not enough food." Driven to Tears, The Police; words truer now than ever).
But maybe out there some company has made a cheap, small, easy-to-use, basically featureless digital camera that allow me to take quick web-oriented photos. A fast shutter speed would be nice, but I recognize that is a feature that is difficult and expensive to implement for a digital camera. I want a camera that I can whip out of my pocket (or geeky belt holder) and take a quick picture of some craziness I might pass in my wanderings in the streets and alleys of Montreal. I don't want to have to set this or set that. It blows my mind how every single point and shoot camera has a crazy knob with like 12 different functions. They should be called "geek out for 10 minutes then point and shoot". Continuing with my example, I want to be able to go home, plug the camera into my mac and drag the photos to my desktop. I would really, really, really love a camera that shows up in OS X as a hard drive so I don't have to use the crappy hell that is iPhoto (ugh, I feel a knot of anger in my stomach just thinking about it) or the palatable but still pretty pathetic Image Downloader or whatever the hell the other utility that Apple provides. Why can I open all digital cameras as an external drive in Windows, but not in Apple, the company that pioneered the notion of windows and dragging documents from place to place?
One of my camera geek friends tweeted me that cheaper cameras eat up batteries fast and have pretty "bad" images. I don't really understand what would be worse image quality-wise about one digital camera versus another (and I'm suspicious about such an opinion from camera geeks; plus these images are going to be small).
So there you have it. Any suggestions would be most helpful. I'll get back to the meat of the stuff in the next couple days. Summer is nice!
2 comments:
I don't even know how much a camera is supposed to cost, so...
John Gruber used to rant and rave about the Flip products (http://www.theflip.com/en-ca/products/specs.aspx) but recently said devices such as the iPhones are basically doing a good enough job. An iPod Nano may do the job ( I think you can configure them to sync to a folder instead of going trough iPhoto).
I mean, a camera that can play your music and tune to FM radio isn't that bad.
Olivier, an intriguing suggestion, but I'm holding off on investing any real money into a cell phone for when the carrier oligarchy loosens their grip.
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