I just got a new camera because my old one is dying.
I picked the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-L1 because I wanted:
- Optical zoom
- 3 or more megapixels (it has 4M)
- the smallest damn camera I could find
Begin rant:
In my camera search I'd occasionally walk into a camera store and ask to
see the smallest camera they had, then if they'd pull out some clunker that
was the size of a normal camera, and I'd just turn around and walk out.
It was funny, because they all had smaller cameras, it was just that some
of them were confused about what the word "small" meant. Maybe they missed
school that day in the first grade, I don't know.
End rant.
Anyways, after much soulsearching (and playing with the cool, but too large
Sony M1), I realized that the L-1 was the camera of my dreams, because:
- The CyberShot L1 is just about as small as they get - and the candy-bar form
factor instead of an Altoids tin form factor was a plus for me, being
less breakable - though I carry it in the same pocket as my Ericcson
T610 phone, and since they are similar dimensions, I often mix the
two up, which is more cute than annoying.
- It does much better photos than I expected, and even though the
lens is small, it takes better photos than my last camera because
of it's AF illuminator (which also makes it possible to see your
target at night)
- It does 640x480 video at 30fps, and while the L1 doesn't do MPEG4
compression like the M1 (allowing 1 hour of video on a 1G stick)
it can still fit something like 12 minutes on a 1G, and it's not
often I need more than 12 minutes. Besides, at half the price,
I can buy a couple more 1G sticks and have plenty of storage.
Now I just need to figure out how to transcode the video to a
smaller file size for the web.
- For reasons that are not at all clear to me, it's damn cheap.
I got mine for $250, hundreds of dollars cheaper than other cameras
that were far, far less desirable to me. How fortunate is that?
So, here are my very first test shots, for your viewing pleasure. Since
HaleyMo was visiting me, and since she's an awfully cute test subject, she's
the victim of my new camera shenanigans.
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