As I have mentioned previously, I have been in the market for a new camera. I almost bought a Canon back in July, but had second thoughts. Finally, after much deliberation, and reading a review from David Pogue (login required), I finally caved and bought the Sony DSC-WX1. I was actually hoping to get away from Sony, because I have grown tired of their fondness for proprietary memory cards and data connectors. But they sucked me in with the wide-angle lens, excellent low-light sensitivity, automatic panoramas, and HD video.

And since this is about photography, I have some example pictures online. Here is one of my favorites so far:

Sun setting over the Pacific Ocean

And I have uploaded these galleries:

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• Going for a run in the Marina (compare against my old camera)
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• Some product shots
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• Hiking in Pacifica

And now, a word about video

One of the things that I was most excited about with my new camera is the ability to shoot HD video. And so far, I've been impressed with the output from the WX1. However, when I went to upload some sample video, I found that most online sites, even if they purport to offer HD viewing, scale down the size of the video. For an example, see one of my sample videos that I uploaded to Flickr. Since I want to be able to show an un-adulterated video from my camera, I decided to fool around with the new HTML5 video tag:

Sample video from the DSC-WX1
(>8MB, requires Safari 4, Chrome, or Firefox 3.5)

I actually leveraged much of Mark Pilgrim's excellent tutorial, and encoded an Ogg version (for Firefox), and hacked up some JavaScript to display an error in non-HTML5-compliant browsers. Kindof a fun diversion, and I am really enjoying watching video natively in my browser, instead of via flash.

End video tangent

In summary, I'm really enjoying my new toy. I still need to play around with it more, but that's what going hiking is for. If you want to read more, I'm going to post a few more of my favorite photos after the break.

-Andy.