Wonderful World of Gadgets

A couple of people have asked me what digital cameras I have in my collection:

• Canon Powershot S400 - small, compact digital with a 4.0 megapixel CCD and a 3x zoom. I take this with me pretty much everywhere. Great for taking snapshots but not so good for more artistic shots where you need some manual control.
  
• Canon Powershot G2 - compact "prosumer" digital camera with a 4.0 megapixel CCD and a 3x zoom. This camera is about the size of a small paperback book and weighs as much as a Harry Potter novel. It's quite hefty but has a fold out LCD display and some great manual controls for artistic shots. My two gripes about this camera: it's slow to start up, and it has a very limited zoom (3x).
  
• Canon EOS-10D - digital SLR camera with a 6.3 megapixel CCD and the ability to attach any Canon EF-mount lens to it. This is by far my favorite camera. With the right lens, you can take some really awesome photos. It's quite heavy so you can't take it everywhere.
  
• Canon EOS-1Ds - expensive ($8,000!), professional digital camera with a 11 megapixel CCD and the ability to attach any Canon EF-mount lens to it. This camera is a behemoth; it's nearly 50% larger and heavier than the Canon EOS-10D. The photos that you can take with this camera are poster-quality and can easily be published in any magazine, but it's hard to use and the trying to access any of the more obscure features requires an hour with the user manual.
  
• Kodak CX4200 - cheap point-&-shoot digital camera with a 2.0 megapixel CCD and no zoom. I paid $99 for it at a Day-After-Thanksgiving-Sale at Best Buy and the photos from it are OK, but not crips and sharp like my other Canon cameras. I take this with me on the ski slopes, to the beach, or anywhere else I have a good chance of breaking a camera.

What's my favorite camera? It depends on what types of photos I want to shoot and where I'm shooting them. That's why I have so many (different) cameras!

I just got the chance to play with a Canon EOS-1Ds digital camera. The $8000 camera is Canon's top of the line digital SLR camera. Some of the great features that the camera has includes:

• 11.4 megapixel CCD sensor. (Great for those 13x19 prints from your high end inkjet printer)
  
• A fully magnesium sealed body, based on Canon's best selling professional EOS-1V film camera - feels as solid as a car engine
  
• You can take up to 3 photos/second, up to 10 frames before the fast internal memory is full
  
• The ability to store photos both as JPEGs and in RAW format (great if you want to edit the photos on your PC later)
  
• A wide variety of metering schemes (how the camera measures the exposure) that you can choose from: evaluative, partial, center-weighted, and spot/multi-spot metering
  
• Custom white balance setting (set your own color termperatures)
  
• ISO 100-1250
  
• Firewire (IEEE 1394) connectivity to your PC

The greatest feature that the camera has is a "full frame" sensor. Most digital cameras (including the Canon EOS-10D) have CCDs that are NOT full frame; they have field of view that is cropped and you have to add a "focal length multiplier" when picking a lens. (E.g. a 100mm lens on a EOS-10D actually becomes a 160mm lens because of the cropped field of view).

I used the Canon EOS-1Ds to take some photos of the Blue Angels a couple of weeks ago(with a Canon 75-300mm f/3.5 IS lens). The photos were simply amazing:

I'm a big fan of Canon cameras, both still photography cameras (such as the Canon EOS-10D) and digital video cameras. I recently had the chance to shoot some video using the Canon GL2.

The Canon GL2 features a triple-ccd image sensor. There's a separate CCD sensor for the three primary colors, (blue, red, and yellow) so that the video looks clean, crisp, and the color balance is set just right. I had used a single CCD sony digital video camera and the image quality from the GL2 is far superior to the Sony camera.

The GL2 also has a bunch of other great features not found on your run-of-the-mill consumer video camera, including a built-in stereo boom mic, a 100x flourite optical zoom lens, an image stablizer, and lots of manual controls (you can set the aperature on the lens and specify the color temperature on the white balance).

My favorite lens for use on the Canon EOS-10D digital camera is the Canon EF 28mm-135mm f3.5 IS lens. The IS stands for Image Stablizer, which actually allows you to take relatively sharp photographs without a flash in dark conditions. If you flip the stabilzer on (there's a switch on the lens) under certain light conditions, the photographs look a lot sharper than pictures taken without the image stablizer turned on. Nikon doesn't have this innovation in their lenses yet, so Canon has the lead.

Several photo review sites recommend the 23-135mm f3.5 IS lens as the best one for the Canon EOS-10D camera. Having used the lens to take a ton of photographs, I'd have to admit that the reviewers are dead on.

This camera is awesome! Check out the Canon EOS 10D digital camera. 6.3 megapixel images. It's an SLR camera so it works with any EF canon mount lenses. And best of all, you can get it for under $1500! I've used the EOS-10D to take several images with it using a 28mm-135mm Image Stabalizer lens and the images are amazing and sharp. (One issue: the Canon EOS-10D has an aspect ratio isn't the same as film; there's a 1.6 multipler factor, which means that a 100mm lens becomes a 160mm lens when you put it on the camera. You don't get as much wide angle coverage as film, but for most people, this isn't too much of an issue).

Here's a sample image I took with the Canon EOS-10D (scaled down, of course, using a Canon EF 28mm-135mm f3.5 IS Lens):

Segway, LLC is coming out with a new p-series mini-segway in the next couple of months or so. It's about 40% smaller than the original segway scooter and it goes 10 miles per hour (instead of the 12 mph speed of the i-series which you can buy of Amazon today).

For about $100, you can get a small pager-like device that lets you AOL Instant Messager away from your computer. Well actually up to 150ft away from your computer. The Motorola IMFree connects to your PC using a low power radio to transmit AIM messages to your friends. It's pretty nifty but I can't see me having to IM my friends so much that I need to spend $100 on another gadget.