Seeing double

Last week I saw an add on Craigslist for not one, but two Nikon Coolpix 5600 cameras for $30 each. Well I had a 5600 and took some of my favorite digital pictures with it. I totally wore the thing out. I took thousands of pictures with it, and it was one of those cameras that seemed to make magic for me when more expensive cameras taking the same shot fell short. I took this picture with my old one. I didn't edit the color out of it or anything, the only thing I did to it was shrink the image size to post it.

So I thought about it for a while and contacted the seller and today I bought both of them for $40. Both with nice cases and memory cards. This guy and his wife each had one. One was pretty much mint and the other one had been used more, but they both worked perfect and at $20 a pop I thought it was a pretty good deal.

These cameras have optical view finders which is a feature found only on more expensive point and shoot cameras these days. They aren't super thin so they don't vignette, or get dark around the edges of the frame due to the lens not being able to gather enough light and get it to the edges of the sensor. (the picture above did not vignette the way I'm talking about. The camera was just really stopped down in this case due to the way the light was..) They are 5 megapixel which is enough since they have nice lenses. They take two AA batteries which is ok if you use Nickel Metal rechargable batteries. The view screen isn't that big but it does represent the image pretty well and lets you know if you have made a good shot. And they don't have manual controls or exposure compensation, but you can trick the camera into getting the right exposure.

So right away I'm going to revert back to using one of these most of the time outside when I'm not using my DSLR.

We expect things to get better and better over time and for the most part they do, but sometimes you find a product that you really like and the newer versions just aren't quite the same.