The bane of my existence, or at least the part of my life devoted to being a gadget hound and early adopter, is feature creep — the annoying tendency of tech companies to pile on feature after feature with each new iteration of a product until the original usefulness is buried. This tendency explains why I loved the Palm Pilot and Apple iPod but have grown increasingly weary of Microsoft Office and most new cars.
Today, the New York Times has a brief blip about an upcoming Canon digital camera, the SD700 IS. I’ve been a fan of this line of Canon’s digital elph cameras which take pictures with accurate color and give me enough manual control when I want it to take difficult shots while being small enough to carry everywhere. We had a Powershot S500 until it broke and currently have an SD400.
You’ll note that I downgraded from the top-end to the mid-tier last time I was in the marketplace. That’s because Canon updated the high-end to 7.1 megapixels. That just seemed like a waste of money to me. I don’t typically even use the maximum resolution on our 5 megapixel camera. Hard drive space is plentiful these days but not unlimited. And I’ve been somewhat annoyed at the time it takes to upload hefty digital snapshot files to online services like Ofoto for display and printing (sure, that’s also a function of the crummy upload speeds granted to me by broadband providers Comcast and Verizon Wireless, but hey, it’s reality).
So that’s why I’m impressed with the new Canon top o’ the line SD700 IS. They’ve actually dialed back the maximum resolution to 6 megapixels while adding three features I want REAL BAD right now: image stabilization, lower shutter lag and an ISO 800 setting. Hmm, how much can I get for my SD400 on eBay do you think?
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