Well folks, I’ve given up on the Swedes. While a few Canon cameras did show up on their official lost and found Web site, none are mine. I have given up and am moving on. I’m grumpy (I couldn’t even take pictures while hanging out with cool folks like Robert Scoble and meeting Mike Arrington at the TechCrunch7 party last night – although Thomas Hawk caught a picture of me!), but I’m moving on.
After looking around briefly, I narrowed down quite quickly to Canon, Panasonic, and Sony for my choices. Why these three? Well, I don’t know much about digital cameras myself, but I do know a few people who do, and these are the three brands they all own. Might sound simplistic, but it works for me.
I am eliminating Sony from the list even though I have a Memory Stick slot in my laptop, I prefer to use SD cards as my wife‘s laptop (Dell Inspiron 700m) has SD built-in, as does her Treo 700w and our Garmin Nuvi 350, etc. Bottom line: I want to use SD. Also, at $36 for a 2GB SanDisk card, it’s hard to argue!
Rich (my boss at Sling Media) uses a Panasonic, and Dave Mathews (another coworker) likes them as well. I played with Rich’s camera (Panasonic Lumix) and the picture quality was pretty impressive, but I really didn’t like the user interface, on-screen menus, or button layout all that much. Maybe I fear change, I’m not sure, but I just didn’t like the ‘feel’ of using it. This pushed me towards Canon.
A single visit to Amazon sealed the deal. Why, you may ask? I took a look at the top sellers at Amazon and at the time of writing, they are ALL from Canon. Not some, not a few, not most, but ALL. And while I may not agree with “popularity wins” as my reasoning (seen Titanic?), there’s a certain point where you have to assume all these folks know what they are talking about. Not only that, two of my best friends and my CEO just got Canons in the past month. I smell a winner.
With the variety to choose from, I quickly narrowed my choices down to the SD450, SD630, and SD700. The 450 was the one I ‘thought’ I wanted, as the price wasn’t bad, and has a nice feature set. But with a little more investigation, I decided I’d plunk down the extra $100 to get the latest and greatest. The biggest additional feature to the 700 is the image stabilization technology, which looks like it’s probably becoming a standard feature on most new models. That, plus the amazing customer reviews on Amazon for the SD700 was pretty much all I needed. A final check at DPreview sealed the deal (although it looks like I may need to pick up an extra battery).
Full review to come after it arrives, assuming I don’t go to Sweden again…