Digital cameras

Digital cameras came on the market suddenly in the early 2000's. Many consumers, like me, were caught by this new technology. It seems too good to be true: no more spending money on films, processing and printing photos! How is this possible? After the initial shock, we realized that film cameras will become obsolete very soon.

I received my first Sony Cybershot from my children as a x'mas present in 2004. This camera operates on 3.2 mega pixels and has a 16 megabytes memory card. It last for a couple of years until I dropped it by accident one day. The LCD screen was broken. I made enquiries at Dick Smith, Hamilton about repairs. They came back with a quotation. It will cost NZD170 to replace the LCD screen in Auckland. I will also have to pay for courier fees to and from Auckland, another NZD40 and had to wait 2 weeks for repairs.

In the shop, a similar camera was selling then at NZD 299. It was a newer model at 4.1 mega pixels and has double the memory space of the old Cybershot at 32 megabytes. Immediately I bought this new Sony Cybershot and forget about repairing the old camera. I was using this new camera during my holidays in Malaysia in 2007 and the camera ran out of memory space. A 32 megabyte memory card was just too little. I was forced to buy a bigger memory card in order to continue taking pictures, during my holidays.

A year later, in NZ, I bought a third Cybershot for NZD 179 in 2008. This one has 7.2 mega pixels and a One Gigabyte memory card! The technology is improving in leaps and bounds and the price is coming down real fast. My first Cybershot cost my kids NZD599 in 2003 and it was their combined x'mas gift to me. There is just one small problem. Where do I keep all these hundreds of digital photos? I downloaded a Picasa software programme and stored all my photos there on my computer. Some I uploaded to Picasa web albums for safe keeping. Others I uploaded to my blogs where no floods will destroy my photos any more! Some of my Kodak prints were lost in the Lutong floods in 1981. (I was too busy jacking up my new car and putting bricks underneath the tyres in the middle of the night. Some clever friends drove their cars and parked them earlier, on higher ground near the approach to the Lutong bridge.)

One thing is for sure, the quality of the digital photos are much better than the Kodak prints. The only problem I had was how to file all these thousands of photos, so that I can still have finger tip control for immediate access at any time. I have more than 45,000 stored on Picasa on my computer. I need to be able to find a photo instantly for upload to my blogs. Just look at the colour, definitions and clarity of these digital photos. Click on the red flowers and the photo increase to 3X the size shown here. I do not think that many people would want to go back to using Kodak film cameras ever again, except perhaps those whose hobby is photography. 

For a start, you need to scan the Kodak prints, save them into your HD before you can upload them to the internet, blogs or attach them to your emails. We are certainly learning a lot of new tricks all centred around the computer. My son Kevin has moved on to using an ipad instead of a laptop. It is much smaller, especially for use during travelling. The ipad is a mobile phone, computer and a camera among other things. It is great to have an all in one; but not for me. I simply cannot remember which buttons to press and in what order. For the same reason, I am still using a cassette tape player in my car and at home, complete with amplifier and two huge Marantz speakers. I really do not believe that music would  sound the same way with an mp3 and the windows will not shake as it is doing now in my car!

Here is my sound system in NZ, old but functional. The windows can still rattle when I turn up the volume on the amplifier.