Andy Reitz (blog)

 

 

I finally bought a new camera

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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
Sun setting over the Pacific Ocean

And I have uploaded these galleries:

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.

Golden Gate
Golden Gate bridge, at dusk

Panoramas at the top
Panorama of Pacifica, CA

Volvo navigation
Volvo S40 navigation, at night

Moscone park
Walking home through Moscone Park at night