A year older, really?

Strange, I don't feel a year older. Frankly I think I stopped feeling older not too long after getting out of high school. Well, perhaps gaining weight has made me feel a little older, but not much.

Remember folks: Growing older is unfortunately mandatory. Growing up is optional.

The cameras are calling me...

Well, it seems I managed to damage my Canon A60. It was forgotten in my car for a couple of days, not a good place for a digital camera to hide out here in Arizona. It's not dead, but the sensor picks up much noise when taking pictures. It's a roll of the dice, some pictures the noise wouldn't be noticeable at small sizes, others you'd think the JPEG file was damaged.

However, seeing as how my birthday just passed I find myself with a modest BB gift card. Not enough to buy even one of the cheap almost-a-toy cameras, but enough to notice. So the cameras are calling me, trying to tempt me into the store, reminding me how much fun it was carrying that A60 around everywhere on my belt.

The big choice is coming down to: Pocket Camera or Long Zoom

I've heard some nice comments about the Minolta X20. It's only a 2 megapixel camera like my A60, but it's also only 3.4 x 2.6 x 0.9 inches in size. It uses two AA batteries rather than a proprietary battery, and uses SD/MMC cards (Compact Flash and SD are my preferences since they're so commonly used and priced decently). $179 at Best Buy

In the Long Zoom category I've heard some nice comments about the Canon S1 IS. Pricier at $499 dollars, I would want to wait longer to save up money (sure my card can take the hit, but I'd rather not add so much debt). The S1 is 4.4 x 3.1 x 2.6 inches, which is touch larger than my A60 was and the A60 was already a touch too large to be considered a pocket camera (not unless you're talking about a jacket pocket). On the other hand the S1 adds another megapixel, has a lens equivalent to a 35mm camera 38-380mm zoom lens, has an image stabilization system, and can manage a slightly better lens aperture at full zoom than the A60 (3.1 vs. 4.8). The S1 could be nice for managing to get pictures of some of the wildlife that actually shows up here deep in the urban areas, and the A60 the few attempts I managed at pictures of birds, lizards, or rabbits showed very little detail.

Really I'd like to have both a pocket camera and a nice Long Zoom (especially if the zoom camera was a DSLR with a nice low fixed aperture zoom lens), but on my current budget...

I think I'll be spending lots of time on camera sites for a while...

Another Long Zoom camera

Another camera I'm looking at is the Fuji FinePix S5000. It's a 3 megapixel camera like the Canon S1 IS, and about $120 dollars cheaper. On the other hand you give up the image stabilization system for that $120 discount. Like the S1 it's a 10x zoom camera, going from a 35mm camera equivalent of 37-370mm. It also uses AA batteries, which I consider a Good Thing (their heavier than the proprietary lithium batteries, but their also much cheaper and in an emergency can be bought at just about any store). On the other hand the S5000 only takes xD memory cards, which aren't used anywhere outside cameras and therefor are more expensive.