View from the Mountain

The best under $250 digital camera

I am a long time photographer, and I have being doing digital photography since its inception.

I have used a lot of SLR cameras including Nikon & Leica.  Since I switched to digital most of my cameras have been Nikon with a small Sony and a couple of Panasonic cameras.  My kids have favored small Canon cameras.

I take a lot of pictures in demanding conditions, and I expect a lot from my cameras,  My Nikon D50 has been a workhorse for several years. 

A couple of years ago a bought a compact wide angle Panasonic Lumix camera.  It has been a great camera with the excepton that it takes a while to focus.

Recently my pocket camera, a Nikon S9 died.  I did not want to spend a lot of money, but I wanted wide angle and as much zoom as I could get.

I ended up buying a Pansonic Lumix DMC ZS-1 from Amazon for $240 before shipping.

The camera has 10.1 megapixels and 12X optical zoom plus 25mm wide angle capability.  I have used it hard, and I am very pleased.  I have done a number of interesting pictures with it, including the one in this post.

Because of its compact size it is my default camera these days.

I found it to be reliable and fast to focus.  I have used the camera to take pictures one handed while driving my skiff.

I even recorded a video while sitting in a pew in our church.  The camera was hand held with no tripod and no external microphone.

This one minute clip of the musical group Southern Grace is a testament to the camera's video capabilities.

I just posted another hand held video. This time it is a thunderstorm that struck our area this afternoon.

I am looking forward to doing some video with a tripod.

I did not buy the camera for its video capabilities but they are certainly a bonus.

The zoom feature which allowed me to get this great picture of a Willet this weekend in Atlantic Beach is enough to make me happy.

I read a lot of reviews before I bought the camera, but none of them gave me a true idea of the versatility of the camera.

Usually if I have to pick one camera, it is the ZS-1.  I can fish and still have it in my pocket.

It just does a great job.  This web page has samples of other photos that I have done with the camera.

This camera is hard to beat for the money. The fast focus, ultra zoom capabilities, wide angle lens, and video capability might make it the best real estate camera there is for the money.

I would definitely rather drag this camera on a trip rather than a DSLR.  If you are going to take it on a trip, I would buy a second battery.

Honest I didn't know they were agents in training

I saw the story,  Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs, in today's Washington Post.

It didn't worry me a lot since I figure the Dragonflies that I know are not going to be easily convinced to take part in anything very far away from the marshes even with genetic engineering.

However, when I happened on the Santa Fe New Mexican version of the story, they had a side bar showing how a tomato hornworm moth could be used as a spy.  Now those evil worms will do anything.

First off, I didn't know they turned into very ugly, giant moths since I kill them before they have a chance to turn into anything but an addition to Davy Jones' locker.

My war with the hornworms is well documented, I even did a post about making them walk the plank.

After all they were attacking my tomato plants. I caught them in the act of destroying foliage and even eating tomatoes right alongside the Fiddler crabs.

It was war.  I would wait for the sun to go down and get them as they got active.  I even had a few pre-dawn raids to capture their young.

Had I not taken out a hundred of these monsters, my tomato crop would have been non-existent.

After all standing between a Southerner and his tomato sandwiches is considered an act of war.

Still I had to come up with a creative way to get rid of them since using poison that close to the water that goes into the White Oak River was out of the question.

I came up with a simple solution.  I just clipped off the tomato stem they were clinging to and heaved it off the dock into the waters of Raymond's Gut.

That way they at least got to take their last meal with them.

I really did not mean to harm our national security.  I had no idea the hornworms were working for Homeland Security.

I would be glad to leave them alone if they would leave my tomato plants alone.

You would think the government could at least provide their agents with some food so my tomatoes would be safe.

You don't suppose those electronic bugs can survive in a Jumping Mullet?  They  have been acting a little suspicious this summer. It could be the steady diet of genetically altered hornworm spies.

The not so reluctant home system engineer

I am beginning to think this is the year of returning to my inner geek. 

First I went to work at Webmail.us where I ended up bringing my own computers, network hub, and even an Internet phone.  Since I was one of only a couple of Mac users, I ended up figuring some of the printing and other technology issues with only a little help.  I actually wrote about that on Applepeels in the post, "Heterogenous Apple nirvana, well almost."  Then we moved the Webmail.us outside sales office to Roanoke, and I ended up setting another office for myself.

Since I do a fair amount of web work, I usually need three machines to survive, a Mac desktop, a Windows box, and a Mac laptop.  When we got a place in the fall on the White Oak River near Cape Carteret, NC, it was obvious that I needed another office.  I decided to leave a Mac at home in Roanoke to drive my big Epson printers, but I felt that I need my dual G5 and my Dell desktop.  My youngest daughter confiscated my Dell laptop for her business classes at UNCC.

I actually enjoy technology when I can make it work.  I'm usually persistent enough to eventually achieve that.  I can move pretty easily from Mac OSX to Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux.  In fact when I want to procrastinate I will often lose myself in technology challenges.  I spent a lot of time in 2004 getting Linux up and running, and experimenting with SUSE and Xandros distributions before settling on Ubuntu as my standard.  When I recently did some upgrades on all three operating systems, I was convinced that Ubuntu was as easy if not easier than Mac OSX.

For my coastal office printers I went with an Ethernet equipped Brother 5250N and a HP AIO Photosmart C6180 which also supported Ethernet.   I installed  a router with firewall and four ports, one of with goes to an Airport Express and another to a small hub.  We are using a cable modem hooked to Time-Warner.  I also have a Vonage Internet phone to go along with our land line.  We are using an AT&T two line wireless phone system which works great.

So far everything seems to be working fine.   The biggest challenge was the  HP AIO which I wrote about in the post, "HP AIO Photosmart C6180 and Mac OSX."  Last night I got the fax working.  Unfortunately I first tried to set it up using the Mac.  That turned out not to work.  I used the Dell to get it going.  The Windows Wizard had another setting which seemed to fix things.  I had already confirmed that the printing works, both text, color, and photo.   Still the HP software for the Mac seems very intrusive.

The HP scanning does work.  Other than the feature to scan directly to iPhoto, which I like a lot, I felt like I was missing my good friend VueScan which I have used in Roanoke to drive my Epson scanner since Mac OSX came out.  I tried to see if VueScan would see the HP C6180 scanner on the network but it did not, even with the most recent version.  Tonight I read through the HP manual to make certain there was no reason to not use the USB port on the AIO while the Ethernet port was active.  I could not find any warning so I hooked up my MacBook using the USB cable from my recently deceased Sony camera.  VueScan saw the scanner and I was in business.

The only thing left is to try is to see how well the printers work with Ubuntu.  There is no rush on that.  That might be a good winter project for a lazy Saturday. 

One of the interesting things that I have run into is that it seems every that every hardware manufacturer, including those who do printers, computers, and cameras has its own suite of consumer digital photo tools.   They're all similar, and it gets a little weird with all the choices of how to manage your photos.  Once you throw in Adode, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, you have to wonder if the market can support this many solutions.  Actually my guess is the market will figure it out. The support people might rightfully view this proliferation as scary.  Just imagine a Mac running Parallels Windows software.  You could have Nikon, Sony, HP, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and Google software all fighting for control of the same photos.

Invariably the client based software doesn't seem to work nearly as well managing photos on the web as the true web based solutions like Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.  That's the case even in the with the iPhoto, iWeb, and dot Mac from Apple who used to be the digital content king.  I wrote about this recently on Applepeels in the post, "My problem with Apple."

I am not  sure why the companies are spending so much money on this segment.  My guess is that there  will be some shakeout, but that's the subject of another post.

Right now I am proud of my new office, and I would recommend all of the products that I am using.  The only exception would be the Parallels Desktop software which turns the MacBook into a Windows box. The problem is probably caused by the measly 1 gig of ram on my MacBook, but I doubt I will figure that out for a while since I have my Dell box running.

I do not have a lot of tolerance for technology gadgets or companies that fail to meet my expectations so expect to see a post or at least a comment if I run into challenges like the IE crash that I had last night after installing Internet Explorer 7.  I did like some of the new feature of IE, but crashing is not a good way to win my confidence.

The office even looks good since I even ran the cables through the desk.  This is the neatest office that I have ever had.  I must be mellowing with age.  Just getting it working used to be the most important task and often the only thing that mattered.   Just do not ask my kids about my old cable tree.

Why Circuit City is exactly what I don't need

As loyalty goes these days, we were pretty loyal customers to Circuit City.  For a long time, Circuit City was the only large national electronics retailer in the area.  We bought lots of stuff from them over the years.

I took some sort of strange pride from the long list of products triggered by entering our phone number in Circuit City's computers.

We certainly hadn't been exclusive Circuit City customers, but looking back on all that we had purchased, we were definitely in the list of good customers.  We also felt good enough about our experiences with Circuit City to give them a chance to win our business when looking for new products.

In fact it was only a couple of weeks ago that we visited the Roanoke area Circuit City store in an attempt to find someone who could actually demonstrate one of the all pervasive all-in-one printer, scanner, copier, fax machines that I'm guessing will be hot products this holiday season.   As I wrote in the post, "Attack of the all in one machines & customer service,"  we didn't have any luck finding a competent sales person in Roanoke among the two Staples, Best Buy, and Circuit City stores that we visited.  We ended up buying a HP AIO in a Morehead City, NC Staples purely because we ran into a really good sales person who gave us a great demonstration and answered all our questions.

In the past we had really good luck with Circuit City.  In summer of 2005, I dropped the Nikon Cool Pix 5200 that was what I like to call my pocket camera.   The very critical optical zoom feature stopped working.  Knowing that to have a repair done on a digital camera costs a minimum of $250, I decided it made more sense to buy a new camera.  We looked around and ended up buying a very nice Sony which would easily slip into my pocket.  I believe it ended up costing about $400 because we bought a couple of years of extended warranty.

We did that for some good reasons.  The Nikon was the second camera I had dropped and had to replace. Previous experience with Circuit City led us to believe that they had one of the best no hassle extended warranties in town.  My son, when he was a teenager, went through two or three CD-ROM players that didn't work well.  Circuit City, true to their word then, swapped them out, no questions asked.  We also bought our oldest daughter a music system that had a CD-changer that never could be repaired so Circuit City to their credit also swapped that out with no problem.

My wife and I both heard the pitch when the Circuit City sales person promised that my camera would be repaired or swapped out no questions asked if there any problems with it during the Circuit City protection period.

After my Sony camera stopped working recently, we took some time on a Saturday afternoon to drive to Jacksonville, NC from our second home in Swansboro, NC to take my camera for what I thought would be a quick swap.  We went directly to the service area, where after checking our warranty, the girl at the desk told us we would have to call a 800 number and trouble shoot the camera first. 

That's when I should have picked up the first signal that  Circuit City's no hassle, cover any problem warranty had become something that looks like a scam at least in the case of my camera.

So we turned around and worked our way through some nasty Saturday afternoon traffic in Jacksonville and got home in about 45 minutes.  I called the 800 number and since the camera would no longer turn on, I was told they would send a box for shipment to their repair center.  Of course the box went to our other home in Roanoke, Va and on our next visit there I forgot to bring the camera with me. I ended up having to haul the box to NC and ship the camera from there.

We got back from NC last night, eleven days later, and a message was waiting for us  the phone.  It  was that Circuit City had found corrosion in my camera and the warranty didn't cover that.  They promised to return my camera to me without being repaired.  I am sure there was some fine print in their extended warranty or extended service plan to cover their rears, but instead of increasing their profit, they just permanently got rid of a big profit center, namely me.

The interesting result of this is that Circuit City has turned out to be exactly the kind of electronics store that I don't need contrary to what their currently television advertising is saying.   Instead of getting a customer for life, they've lost a customer for life.

Now I'll still visit their stores to look at products and even ask questions of their sales people, but under no circumstances will I ever buy another product from Circuit City.  I'm done.  Their no hassle extended service plan turned out to be a big expensive hassle that was worse than worthless.  It cost me a Saturday afternoon and money.

In this day of 300 million Americans, I'm sure Circuit City won't lose any sleep over one customer any more than Volvo or Maytag did when they lost me as customers.  Products like Maytag sometimes pay the ultimate price,   Big box retailers usually just reorganize.

The one thing that Circuit City can't take to the bank is any more money of my money for any products no matter how small.  I won't be buying there, and I'll make certain that my kids and wife understand that presents with a Circuit City receipt will not be accepted.

There may not be many choices in local big box electronics stores, but there is enough to make sure Circuit City will never process another charge of mine.  If I run out of local stores, there is always the Internet.

So my new question is that given customer service and products are a real pain these days, will I run out of places to buy things or products that I'll accept before or after I can't figure out how to use most of what they're selling?

Attack of the all in one machines & customer service

In case you haven't been near a computer department at one of the big box stores, prepare yourself for the holiday push.  My guess is that it is "AIOs" or what is actually a printer, scanner, copier, and fax device all in one piece of equipment.

Over the last couple of months I've been trying to set up a small home office in our coastal location.  With an office view that you'll see if you click the link, there is also the challenge of not nearly the amount of space that I have in my Roanoke office where I have a real copier, a real scanner, and multiple printers in a huge basement office with a view that often leads to the photos that I post on my photography site.  Since we had to redo my basement office, "The Saturday afternoon technologist, electronic hair," due to flooding, it seems like I have been setting up home or business offices all year.  That even got me to do a post, "The Instant Economy,"  on how easy things are today when it comes to going into business.

Yet not all of this happens without challenges as any technology user will tell you.  Being mostly a Mac OS X user with occasional forays into Linux and some necessary trips to Windows, I've been suspicious of most AIOs which have traditionally not worked well with Macs.

Part of my suspicions have come from seeing some rather full open box shelves at local electronic stores in Roanoke.  I generally find that open box shelves are a good predictor of what people are having trouble getting to work.

My own self demo experimentations on some of the all in one products confirmed that they aren't the most intuitive products.  Yet they are very compelling and almost a necessity to people like me who are trying to cram a lot into a small space.

I'm pretty picky about technology or a wouldn't be a Mac user.  I'm also methodical and not afraid to ask advice and do lots of Internet research.  Researching AIOs on the Internet turned out to be very frustrating with no real consensus opinions unless I went to a site that was trying to sell me something.

Going to the local stores in Roanoke was no better and almost convinced me that customer service is dead and that people under twenty five aren't nearly as technologically astute as some of the media would have us believe.  Perhaps their technical expertise doesn't go beyond iPods. The experience visitng the big box stores certainly made me wonder how the Roanoke area could be classed as a "Technology Corridor."

We could find no one in two local Staples, the Circuit City or Best Buy, who could actually make one of the AIOs work properly.  One young Staples sales person finally admitted that he hated AIOs because something was always broken.  We also had the misfortune in that store of running into a hostile young clerk when we actually purchased some other office items.  She wasn't very subtle about the irritation I caused by questioning the pricing she gave me on some folders which came from bins clearly marked with other pricing.  She was still snarky even after another staffer went back to check the pricing and confirmed what I said.  Obviously this wasn't a very auspicious beginning to our hunt for just the right piece of equipment.

Thinking that being armed with more information would help, I consulted with a couple of my trusted technology advisors and got mixed advice.  Andy of DesignNine first gave me a Xerox recommendation and then when he learned of my budget and space problems suggested a Canon.  I read some good reviews of the Pixma which is by Canon, but there were also some bad reviews.  My friend Russ, one of the great technologists in Happy Valley up at Penn. State, told me he had enjoyed some good experiences with HP products.

Armed with that information, I headed up to the local Staples in Morehead City, NC.  It was there that I actually had my faith in sales people renewed.  We had been in the store only moments when a Staples staffer probably in her early thirties approached us.  We told her what we were looking for and that we wanted to see the products actually work.  She immediately set off to get what she needed to make that happen.  She got the first test, a simple copy done quickly. 

That was actually more than anyone else had been able to accomplish.  I asked about why the next model up was $100 more, and she came up with a reasonable answer, Bluetooth.  I next challenged her with actually showing us a photo print.  She told me that if I had a memory card with an image, she would be glad to oblige. I went out to the car and got my digital camera, and she quickly got the HP6180C working on the task.  We got a photo printed on regular ink jet paper about a minute later.  I then suggested that I would like to see the machine actually produce a 4X6 print as advertised on photo paper. Another quick trip and she came back with some properly sized photo paper.  About a minute and a half later, we were looking at the print.

They had no Canon products in stock, but as you'll find out if you start looking, the Cannons don't have fax capabilities and also don't come with built-in networking, so they aren't a complete solution by any means.

I'll be reporting on how the HP does with my Macs, Windows, and Linux machines. I would be glad to review a Canon if they want to send me one for a comparison.  The traditional web can't seem to keep up with the slew of new products.  Most of the reviews I saw were from 2005 and on machines that are no longer on the market.

However, the real story today is that having knowledgeable customer sales people sells products and results in happy customers.  I congratulate Staples on having at least one very knowledgeable customer helper in their Morehead, NC store.  It was a real pleasure talking to someone who actually understood the technology and could demonstrate it.  That's something which is getting a little rare these days as big box stores dig deeper and deeper to find warm bodies.

I wonder if they'll ever figure out that having people like the lady in the Morehead City store is a better way of doing it than making their open box shelves larger?