Sunday, June 18, 2006

Berlin boat tour photos and mini Canon SD700 camera review

IMG_0282Earlier this month I had the pleasure of taking a river cruise of sorts through Berlin... including both the former East and West parts.



I shot the photos with my new Canon SD700 camera (which I'm generally pleased but not thrilled with) and posted them on various services.



See my Berlin boat tour photos on...

- Flickr [ set | slideshow ] (strong community, many features, good privacy protection)

- Fotki [ set | slideshow not directly linkable ] (handy admin features, nice hierarchical options)

- Picasa Web Albums [ set | slideshow ] (smart pre-caching, great Picasa integration)



You may note a few funky/overly-general tags (e.g., "Places" and "Geography" and such). This is because I'm having problems debugging a hierarchical-categories-to-IPTC-script. If that doesn't mean anything to you, no worries; it's only a minor annoyance and doesn't affect the photos themselves :-D.



I did slight editing (brightness, contrast, cropping, etc.) using Corel's Paint Shop Pro X (trial version; I'm a paid user of version 8... and God what awful URLs!!!) and organized/tagged the photos using the incomparable and very affordable software called IMatch by Photools.


My thoughts on my new Canon SD700 camera:

- Startup time is wonderfully fast.

- Very easy to use.

- Feels comfortable, solid in my hands.

- Outdoor photos are consistently good, even in lower light.

- Zoom is great, even with movies.

- Movies can be taken even in quite low light!

- Battery life is amazing! I literally shot for hours a day always using the LCD, never once got a low battery warning!


But...

- The image stabilizer helps quite a bit, but still doesn't allow for very-low-light photos.

- Photos -- even at the highest quality setting -- aren't as sharp as I'd like. This is my biggest complaint.

- Battery/SD card door feels flimsy.

- The damn thing is pricey (as "low" as $449 at reputable places).

- I still envy the much thinner/lighter ultra-compacts that my friends have (even though they don't take near-as-nice photos).


* * *


Anyway, I hope you enjoy the pics, and I'd love your feedback and shoutouts and such either here in my blog comments and/or in the comments in the galleries themselves. :-D


1 comment:

  1. I’ve used my SD700 IS for several days now. Before receiving it I was concerned about the reviews on Amazon that talked about the noisy video problem. However, the first reviews were written before the camera was released in the US. So I crossed my fingers. I got my camera from Crutchfield. (By the way, their custom service was excellent!)
    ——

    Marine Engineers Beneficial

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