A new era in photography…for me anyway

Since moving to the west coast in September I’ve basically given up photography. Every once in awhile I’d snap a picture or two with my iphone, but I didn’t break out my DSLR once. I did wander around with a film camera a couple of times, but not may because of the cost/effort required to develop the negatives.

The reason for this are mainly that I didn’t feel like carrying around my big DSLR bag with camera, 3 big lenses, extra CF cards, a portable hard drive, etc. It was just a pain, especially considering the topography of this city. Another reason was that I didn’t want to become any more attached to that gear because I knew, in the back of my mind, that I’d probably have to sell it all since I couldn’t sell my condo back east.

It turns out that I did get to a point where I had to sell my gear. In January I sold the DSLR and one of my lenses (the 35mm f/2.0) for some quick cash. It turned out that I didn’t need to sell my other lenses to feed myself, but they’ve just been sitting here without any use since then. So two weeks ago I sold my favorite lens, the Canon 17-55mm f/2.8 IS. Absolutely fabulous lens, but useless to me right now. Today I put my last lens, a Canon 70-200mm f/4L, up for sale. Hopefully someone wants it.

But that left me completely lacking in the picture taking department. I needed to find something that was considerably cheaper than my DSLR kit yet something that would give me image quality results nearly on par with what I’m used to from the DSLR.

After poking around on DP Review for a bit I decided that I wanted to stick with a Canon camera. It’s what I’ve used and what I liked before. The decision came down to the four cameras below.

• SX 110 IS
• SX 10 IS
• G10
• Rebel XS

I ended up buying the G10 and it should be on it’s way here tomorrow. I picked the G10 for the following reasons.

First, it’s a pretty nice form factor. It’s basically flat when off and fits mu hands nicely. It shoots RAW out of the box. It has a viewfinder, even if it isn’t perfect. It has a hotshoe so I can buy a flash in the future or use a viewfinder if I want to. It has very good image quality at the lowest ISO’s and is even useable in the 400-800 ISO range. And finally, it has a nice set of external controls so I won’t have to hunt around menu’s to change the most used settings.

Picking the G10 means that I didn’t pick the others. Each of them seem to be great cameras at their price point, but each of them had a “fatal flaw” that knocked them out of the running. The SX110IS doesn’t have a viewfinder, doesn’t shoot raw, and didn’t have a hotshoe (so i couldn’t add a viewfinder). The SX10IS seems nice (the SX1IS even better) except that it doesn’t shoot raw* and it pretty big. The Rebel XS looks really nice, but it puts me right back into the DSLR world with a big and bulky camera and the need for carrying around some other accessories.

So there it is. In short order I’ll have a nice “enthusiast” digital camera that shouldn’t be such a pain to haul around and that didn’t cost, and won’t continue to cost, a fortune. I’m very excited and can’t wait to get my hands on it! I’ll be linking my photo gallery on the blog here shortly. Hopefully I’ll have some new additions to it soon!

* - there is a “hack”, the CHDK, that opens up all kinds of options on lower end Canon cameras that would have given me raw output on the two lower end cameras, but the other things listed still knocked them out of the running.