James went out and committed camera today.

The first time we laid our eyes on the Sony Mavica with the floppy disk, we were hooked. One of our friends got the original model, then another friend got the next one up, with the 10X zoom lens. When my Pentax film camera went bad (and the regular lens broke) for the second time in 1998, it was that camera with the 10X zoom that I coveted (the worst thing about leaving my Pentax was the beautiful telephoto lens I had bought for it).

But I ended up buying the new model that was out that year, the one that also took MPEG videos. After Merlin and Leia had died, I was regretting never having any "film" of them and bought the FD81 especially for Bandit. The MPEGs are very small, considering the floppy disk space limitations, but I have moving pictures of my baby (including one darling one I keep at work to cheer me up: it's Bandit making love to the spindles on the old red chair). That's what's important.

But the FD81 only has a 3X lens and I would complain every time we went somewhere where I wanted a closeup of something in the distance. The FD81 lens must be the orphan of the Sony world; Sony makes accessory telephoto and wide-angle lenses for every Mavica they have, except my FD81, or so the catalogs I've seen say, so I couldn't even improve my condition that way.

I'd look at the new Sony Mavicas, which save to CD-R/RW, but all of the darn things have 3X optical lenses, too. They actually brag they have 6X lenses, but the "times 2" is actually a digital magnifier, not an optical one. All it does is make the pixels bigger. Sorry, I want a real zoom lens, not one that plays one on camera. :-) (James must hate to take me to photographed events. Invariably I will see the news reporter with a huge periscope-sized telephoto lens on his camera, point and say, "Now that's a lens," with unconcealed envy.)

Meanwhile the trusty old FD75 has lived on in the corner of camera departments of certain stores, growing cheaper all the time. After taking itty-bitty pictures of great big airplanes flying way overhead on Saturday, James finally tossed in the towel. We found an FD75 sitting in the display case at Eckerd's, forlorn and overlooked because it doesn't do megapixels on memory sticks, at a quarter of the price of what I paid for the FD81.

So now we have MPEGs and magnifications, too. :-)

Anyway, in unpacking the FD75, I was reading the manual. Now, when our friends first got a Mavica, someone had mentioned to me that it had a timer function--basically you could set it on a flat surface and then include yourself in the picture. Well, surprise, my FD81 didn't seem to have it. I figured it was a function I had traded for the MPEG availability. But, cool, the FD75 did have the timer capability.

I looked at the timer symbol and the instructions on how to use it. Funny. I'd seen the same symbol on my camera. I turned it on to look.

Well, slap on the dunce cap and call me Dopey. Mine had the timer capability all along.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 4:02:00 PM

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