brand loyalty

Well, in a seemingly incongruous move, at least insomuch as my normal rhetoric on the subject goes, I picked up a tiny point-n-shoot digital the other day, the Canon SD780is.  Available in a variety of colors, but I tend to agree with Mr. Ford that the only acceptable one is black.

It’s incongruous because I don’t like lots of megapixels crammed onto small camera sensors, and this camera certainly does that: 12.1 effective MP on a 1/2.3″ CCD.  That’s about the same resolution as my 5D but on a sensor 1/5 the size.  Yes, there are noise issues.  Yes, the camera does squeeze the photos it takes down to 3MB jpegs at the highest quality setting.  But, I’m not using this thing for gallery prints.  I’m using it for:

• My day job, which now wants me to take photos of the interiors of every house I see so as to provide additional content for our website, which no, I’m not giving you a link to, and to put certain homes on Craigslist.  I certainly don’t need 12 megapixels for this, so scaling down the photos to something tiny won’t allow you to see all that noise.  Don’t worry, I know this is still a good opportunity to learn more about shooting interiors with an SLR, so I’ll be doing some of that too.  Just not all of it.
• Friend photos.  I like having a camera when I go out with friends, but I don’t necessarily like that camera to be the 5D.  I wanted something pocketable for those times when I simply want nice little memories (or buzzy memories).  It’s easy to spill things on the 5D, I’ve done it a couple times now.  The iPhone doesn’t have a flash.
• The fact that it’s pocketable!  I can have a somewhat decent camera on me at all times!  Especially useful for those times when I want to take a snapshot or some other kind of reminder of places to revisit with more gear.
• The image stabilization.  The following are one-second and 1/8th second hand-held exposures, respectively; although the subject matter isn’t particularly interesting it still made for kind of cool photos:

Oh yeah, it also shoots 720p video.  That’s pretty neat.  As soon as I have a quicker connection to upload something to Vimeo, I’ll show you all a little test run.