So my Canon PowerShot S50 gave up the ghost about a week ago. The shutter no longer opens. So I can take a great picture of the inside of the shutter. So I am a little blue about the camera failure; not for the reasons that most people thinking. Most people are thinking it is because I am disappointed that it failed. I think that after over 12,000 – yup twelve thousand – photos/actuations it is allowed to fail.
I am melancholy as I have been shopping for its replacement it was not easy to find what I wanted. A point and shoot camera that would fit in my pocket easily and discreetly and take uncompressed photos. I found that the two seemed to be mutually exclusive. I decided that instead of going for uncompressed images, I went to size and then compensated by going to high pixel count. Okay ridiculously high pixel count. A Canon PowerShot SD950 IS was what I decided on
Does one really need a 12.1 megapixel camera?
Typically no. Once one is printing out common sizes of pictures up to 8″ x 10″ output 5 megapixels is enough. So why did I go for 12.1 megapixels? To get more data, albeit compressed. Also I have found that by having all that extra info, I can do some cool things like take a picture that is not as tightly zoomed as I would like, I do not do digital zoom in the camera, I can zoom and crop using all those extra pixels.
So then came the fun of how fast do I need to SD memory card to be for the camera. Man am I in the bits and bytes. So since I could not decide I got two smaller cards so I can try the speed out of the cards. Why spend the money for a faster memory solution if the camera cannot write the data any faster?
So Saturday should be interesting as I wait for the new camera and wait to try it out.
Oh yeah, I also made sure that it had Macintosh Drivers. After the fun of the Apple website and Apple Store saying that there was support for the PowerShotS50 but the Canon site saying it does not support it, I decided to go with what the Canon site said which is that it is Macintosh compatible.