Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

This may be my 7 th digital camera, I’m not sureanymore. It is as small as my lastcamera but with more features. I’m notsure what you couldn’t do as an amateur with this camera. It fits into a front pocket on my jeans which is good sinceI will not hesitate to take it with me. The shutter lag I have had in many of my digital cameras does not existin this camera. If you have activegrandchildren, that is huge. I took avideo of my one grandson playing the piano in very low light conditions. The video was more than adequate. I am not impressed with the microphonethough. If you are looking for goodsound quality in your video, this isn’t your first choice. The self timer is self evident and works well. I particularly like the burst feature, againthe active grandkids. This helps get agood photo when they are moving. Thered eye does not seem to screw up the shutter speed which I noticed in one ofmy past cameras. Red eye removal workswell. It took 1 hour and 50 minutes ...

As much as I love the swivel screen on my Canon PowerShot A95, the camera is getting a bit long in the tooth. 5 mega pixels was a big deal, once. Now it is so so but I would keep on using it for that delightful swivel screen except that is getting a bit squirrelly. Not good squirrelly either. Sometimes the first picture or so isn’t even seen on screen and it doesn’t come out either. So I did some research and found a great price and a camera that is just enough smaller that it fits into my jeans or my shirt pocket. Convenience size was my first consideration. The 14 megapixel and the 5X optical were nice bonuses. It has some very nice features that I will seldom use but are nice anyway. It has 22 scene settings for specific types of photos. Realistically I will leave it on auto most of the time but I liked both the scene settings and manual settings. I’ve only taken a couple hundred photos so far but I have been satisfied with the quality. Overall this is a darn good bang for the ...

I blogged on Sanyo Eneloop batteries back on February 27, 2009 I have now had the batteries in two of my cameras for over 6 weeks. I pulled out one of the cameras last night and it fired up, flash worked and the shutter lag was diminished. I wasn’t really aware that the a big chunk of the dreaded shutter lag was based on the ability of the batteries to handle recharging the flash. I took 5 flash pictures almost as rapidly as I could depress the shutter. I am totally impressed with that. In addition the Lenmar, Sunpak and Energizer rechargeable nickel metal hydride batteries don’t hold a charge in the camera for more than two or three days. I find that a bit odd in that they hold up fine in a little flashlight that my grandson wanders around with and leaves lit on a regular basis. Bottom line is if you are dismayed with your rechargeable batteries I strongly recommend the Enloop batteries. This is not a paid blog nor do I have any financial interest in any of the brands mentioned but...

Grandchildren demand lots of batteries not just in their toys but in my cameras. I have two digital cameras that seem to suck the life out of whatever type of battery I install. I have myriad rechargeable batteries. Nicad and NiMh neither of which have been satisfying. I have tried brand name batteries and no name batteries. I have tried the expensive lithium disposable batteries but the disposable aspect offends me. Charge them up, pop them in the camera and they work just fine but they don’t hold a charge for any length of time. If I am lucky they still work 24 hours later but generally they need to be recharged on a daily basis. I read about the Eneloop batteries and liked the idea but I have 16 AA NiMh that work, poorly but they work. Then my Lenmar SpeedCharger died. Luckily it died just within warranty, although Lenmar honored the warranty they did charge me $10.00 shipping and handling or 33% of replacing it. The death of my SpeedCharger forced me to take a look at chargers and ...

You may have seen my semi-rant posts on my Samsung FlipShot. The main reason I got the phone was the camera which turned out to be iffy at best. The killing factor on the phone was it’s refusal to accept incoming calls about 80% of the time. It would send the calls to voice mail before I could get the darn thing open. Made me crazy.(crazier probably) After nearly a year of complaining to Verizon and one replacement of the phone for the same model, Verizon came through and said they would replace the phone for me with a different model. (In fairness to Verizon, their customer support people were always friendly, courteous and very pleasant to deal with under trying circumstances.) My replacement was the LG Dare. It has a better camera and it really does a nice job with the photos. The Touch Screen is terrific. It has tactile feedback which lets you know it really did feel your command. (I go all the way back to the original HP PC touch screens in the mid 80’s which were cool but you nev...

Digital Cameras Save Grandparents Big Bucks Actually a digital camera can save anyone big bucks if you take lots of photos. My biggest source of photos is my grandchildren. The adage of enough typewriters and monkeys and you get Shakespeare holds true with digital cameras. If you take enough photos, eventually you will get some good ones. Digital cameras allow you to take lots and lots of photos. I have had lots of digital cameras. My most frequent brand is Canon, due to their offering of swivel screens on some models. My knees are not what they used to be, a swivel screen allows me to hold the camera at arms length down and shoot at the level of my grandkids. Equally at a Halloween parade, it allows me to hold the camera over my head (and the people in front of me) with the screen pointing down and I can still see what I am trying to photograph. Now there are other manufacturers that have swivel screens but not many and I haven’t any experience with them. The Canon line has served me ...