My new(?) digital camera

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Yesterday was Christmas. There was a cute little present under the tree for me, a digital camera. If you've read this or my other blog Full Tilt Sailing Team regularly, you might recall what happened to my previous digital camera. For those of you who don't know, it was dropped from my wife's backpack into roughly 30 feet of water on Block Island as she clambered from the dinghy onto our sailboat back in August.

Hey, I'm not saying it was HER fault or anything...heck, ANYONE could have forgotten they had a camera in their backpack after using it just a few minutes before. It WAS kind of sad though, because I'd had the camera for about seven years. I miss it.

Since then, I've purchased a Panasonic mini-DV camera, which also works as a 2.3 megapixel digital camera (with the optional memory card). It's OK, but it's a little bulky for casual photos, and I worry about possibly damaging it...like, by dropping it into the OCEAN or something. I wanted an inexpensive (just in case) digital camera to replace it so I asked Joyce to buy me a Fuji A345 to replace it, for about $150.


I like the A345 because it's got a 3X optical zoom, which mostly makes up for the minimal 4.1 megapixal resolution; anyway, my old Casio digital was a sub megapixal model and I got a lot of good use out of it...you can see lots of photos I shot with in on my blogs prior to August '05. Plus, the store offered a free 64MB memory card, to upgrade the standard 16MB card that comes with the camera.

So, Xmas morning I opened up the gift and took out the camera. Hmmm, this is interesting...the batteries are already loaded in the camera. And the plastic sheet that usually covers the LCD window is missing. That's weird. I click the camera on. As I start thinking about it, I switch the camera to PLAY mode.

Bing! There's a picture of somebody's house. I start scrolling through the pictures (half-hoping to find some juicy nudie pics, but no such luck) and see a bunch of photos of the house; like what a real estate agent would shoot. I checked the date stamps, and see they were taken about 3 weeks before Joyce bought the camera.

Those bastards sold me a USED camera! I packed it up, and took it back to the store. Of course, they were out of that model, so I got a full refund. But they didn't notice the free memory chip on the receipt, so I got to keep it. Ha-ha-ha! I burned them for a chip that costs 20 bucks!

Now I've got to find a new camera somewhere else. Normally I enjoy shopping for electronic gadgets, but I'm so burned out from Xmas shopping that I think I'll wait a few days before hitting the local stores to find a replacement. But we had a great time anyway this year, and spent some quality time with the family(s).

We hope you all had a fun holiday.