Wizard's Blog

Last weekend was my wife’s birthday – I won’t say which one

Our camera is a Kodak EasyShare DX3900.  I have no complaints with it, but the camera does show its age in the fact that it only takes 3.1 megapixel pictures, only has a 2x optical zoom and only has a 1.5inch LCD screen.  For some reason my wife has always disliked this camera and wanted a new one.

Canon Powershot A1000IS

So for her birthday this year I bought her a Canon Powershot A1000IS.  It’s 10 megapixel, has a 4x optical zoom and a 2.5inch LCD screen.

It has all the exposure, white balance etc. settings if you know how to use them, but more conveniently for us it has a very nice automatic mode.

The Powershot has a cool face detect feature to make sure that any faces in the picture are in focus.  It also has an optical image stabilizer which is extremely handy because I tend to move the camera just as I press the shutter.

The camera comes with a 32MB memory card, but as that’s only big enough to store about 12 pictures you’ll really need to buy a bigger one.  We got the Transcend 4GB SDHC Class 6 Flash Memory Card and it’s fine.

I also bought the Canon PSC-85 Deluxe Soft Case to go with the camera because Amazon suggested it, but it turned out to be too big.

The camera comes with two AA batteries, so unless you like spending money on batteries you’ll need something like the Canon CBK4-300 Rechargeable Battery and Charger Kit for PowerShot Cameras.

I hadn’t realized that it could do this when I bought it, but the Powershot can record videos.  At 640×480 the 4GB card can hold about half an hour of video.  It’s very good quality – at least as good as any webcam or digital camcorder.

So far we like the Canon Powershot A1000IS very much.

Image via Wikipedia

Years ago, Microsoft released previews of a technology called Photosynth that takes photos of a place and builds a pseudo-3D model of it.  You can navigate around in 3D and view the photos from that angle.

One of the problems with the technology are things that aren’t the same in all pictures.  For example if you took 100 pictures of a monument from all different angles, that would be an ideal subject for Photosynth, but if there were tourists in the photos that would confuse it because they’re in some photos but not others, and they move around between photos.

Photosynth looked really interesting and I was very excited to try it out, but apart from periodically updating the previews, nothing was released.

And then out of the blue, a few days ago they released it!

I’m eager to try it out, but I don’t have a lot of photos of one subject to use.  If I ever get around to it I’ll post the results here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Photosynth goes live
• Photosynth: it’s here!
• Photosynth Launches
• Photosynth and Photo Gallery panoramic stitching explained
• Photosynth: It’s Up! It’s Down! It’s Back Up, Sorta
• Microsoft Live Labs Introduces Photosynth, a Breakthrough Visual Medium (Microsoft)