New camera

Our new camera arrived yesterday. It’s a Casio Exilim EX-S2, and oooh it’s gorgeous.

We already have a perfectly good digital camera (an Olympus C3000), but it’s chunky, and we carry it around in a padded pouch. It has served us extremely well for the last two years, and will continue to do so. The pictures it takes are crisp, with vivid colours even under poor lighting conditions. It does great close-ups.

But we were finding that when it comes time to take Alex out on an adventure, it’s yet another bag to lug around. Alex is too tall to fit in the backpack any more, and so we usually bring the pushchair along. So we have a boy, a pushchair, a little backpack with supplies, and a camera bag. The camera bag does fit in the supplies bag, but taking snapshots becomes so much less spontaneous when you have to pull the pack off your back, open it, take out the camera bag, open it, take out the camera, switch it on, and…oh, he’s doing something else now.

The Exilim is the size of a credit card, only thicker. It’s pocketable. It turns on and is ready to take pictures in about a second. It has a fixed focus lens, so there’s very little shutter delay. And it has a 2 megapixel resolution, which means the images come in at up to 1600 x 1200. It is thoroughly sweet.

The photos it takes aren’t as good as those of the Olympus. But we got it as a snapshot camera, not as a high-end solution. And it takes some wonderful snapshots. It seems to do better with lots of light than it does indoors, but even indoors and without a flash it’s pretty good, provided you can keep the camera steady. (And this is not as easy as you might think. Its small size works against it in this regard.)

Overall, it promises to be a great addition to our photographic arsenal.