As you may very well recall when last we spoke I was on a quest to find a new-fangled digital camera. I can now announce that the search is over and I'm the official owner of a Canon PowerShot SD700. It was a bit more than I originally intended to spend, but I plan on keeping it for a while (my current digital camera is 8 years old and it's not really even mine - it's a loaner that I've been using for the past 4 years) and I probably would have regretted not getting the ImageStabilization, so what's a few extra clams, eh?

It sure is a sexy looking creature, as far as silver and black plastic goes, and while it's not as small as some of the others I think that's a plus as the credit-card sized cameras don't look like they'll hold up over the long run IMO. I picked up a 1 gig flash card as it comes with a 16 meg card (WTF!) and the one gig card was only 10 extra clams.

The reviews claim it's a bit short of features but right out the box I found it plenty confusing - enough that I had to sit down and look through the manual before using it. But once I got the gist of the different modes it's really not too tough to work.

Firstly, I was blowd away by how fast it boots up, my old Olympus takes about 20 minutes to come on after you press the power button, this little bugger is ready to go in about a second or two. Very nice. It's also very responsive once you press the shutter whereas the Olympus had a much longer delay before snapping off the photo. The recovery time between shots is pretty good too, unless you shoot something that takes a lot of processing - like stuff in the dark. The LCD viewer is the schiznit - crystal clear and great clarity.

I snapped off some early-morning low-ish light shots from my balcony at the YMCA Rehab Centre - as the ice cube lake gets this dark blue kind of glow to it which looks bitchin - and even though the shaky camera icon kept popping up (when your shutter speed drops too low a RED shaky icon shows up to tell you to use a tripod or whatever.) the shots don't look too blurry. Here's the higher-res version.

I had IS turned on and I'm assuming it was helping.

I ran down to the park during lunch and took some shots of the lake and here I ran into some trouble. The Auto mode seems to be a bit bright (it was real sunny out and the ice makes things twice as bright) so I tried the manual mode with the exposure cranked down a bit and things came out much better.

The LCD screen was pretty washed out in the sun and I didn't think to turn it all the way up (there's a quick way to do that that I read about later) but the viewfinder (as tiny as it is) let me aim fairly well, not that aiming was too difficult - you just point it towards Canada and click.

I downloaded the GIMP for Windows and the blasted thing actually works! It's been a few years since I've used it though - so I'm going to have to re-learn the "intuitive" interface and whatnot - but I'm pretty thrilled that it seems to run just fine under Winders.

Right, so there ya have it - I've got some work to do.