yup, we spent all day yesterday driving all over town, looking for a real cam for the balloon fest tomorrow... long day of comparison shopping at pawn shops, camera shops, even thrift stores...

the last place we went was a cam shop at the mall across the street from us (after spending some seven hours running all over town) and the guy was great and got us exactly what we wanted... we just told him our requirements, he thought a long moment, reached in the case and pulled out one cam and it turned out to be perfect...

so, firstly, we want to loudly say BIG THANKS to Wess, the store manager at the Cottonwood Mall Ritz Camera!
if we had started there, we could have saved ourselves several hours of driving all over town... he was a huge help, very knowledgable, no pushy sales, a real pleasure to do business with!
he even let us test compatibility with our psion... he took a pic of us on his card, i popped the card in, and it loaded right up...

ok, so, the camera we got is the Nikon Coolpix 2000...

everything we wanted (like cf, jpg format, auto-timer, optical zoom, video out) and even does video clips in quicktime format and can make thumbnails of the pics...

all for NINETY DOLLARS!!

the next best we were considering was at target, not nearly as good, for $150...

it is a discontinued model, and we bought their damage protection plan, he claims we can hit it with a hammer and bring it back...

and we already have two 128mb cf cards for it... (we currently use them in our mp3 players, so, now they will have to do double duty until we get some even bigger cards...)


but, enough talk, how about some pics, eh?

i got up at 7:30am (after staying up until 4 playing with the thing) and went downstairs and started getting pics and vids of some of the mountains and balloons and stuff...

so, to start with, how about that balloon i took pics of yesterday... it went by again today, so, it makes for an excellent comparison example...

firstly, here is probably the best pic i got of it with the dreameye...


that was the old and busted, now behold the new hotness...


and, a close-up using the tightest optical zoom (3x)...


and those are on the lowest quality setting (1:16 compression) and smallest size (vga, 640x480)...

and here is a video of it as it vanished from site [QuickTime]...


now, since this page is pretty heavy already, i am not going to post a bunch of pics here, and i have not yet started using the thumbnails feature it offers...
sooo, here is where the rest of our first pics and vids are from last night and this morning...
http://insidiousplots.com/photos/2004-sept-NEWCAMERA/
i am still uploading stuff and probably will be all day...

mornings around here are gorgeous with the balloons all over the place and the mist over the mountains and across the city, so, the pics are very much worth taking a look at... there are also a couple vids from last night, like coming down the hill from rio rancho, looking out over abq, which we thought turned out very cool...

currently, there are pics in all three quality settings, and i took one huge one at the max size and max quality to show what the best this thing can do is (at least, in my unskilled hands)... it is nearly 600k... dpp will not even attempt to load it...

i see space becoming an issue very soon... however, we will probably be using the lowest quality and smallest size for 99% of the pics...

btw, speaking of space issues...
   VERY IMPORTANT:
these vids are like 4-6mb each, they will NOT stay for long (only a few hours), see them while you can, save them if you ever want to see them again, they will be deleted before tomorrow... we are keeping a copy of everything on videotape, but, not the files themselves, we just don't have the room...
and remember that they will be trickling in probably all day... i am uploading something like 30mb of vids at this very moment... on dial up :( (so far, it has been taking about 40 minutes each...)

as you may have noticed, i have created a special directory for all these test pics and vids (/2004-sept-NEWCAMERA)... starting tomorrow, pics and vids will be going in a /2004-oct directory and all balloon fest pic will go in /2004-oct-AIBF, and there should be tons of them as i expect the next ten days we will be taking hundreds of pics of the balloons... who knows how many will be kept, but, the uploading will be probably almost constant...


we got our first DreamEye on may 25th, 2002, and have used it to take literally hundreds of pics, it has served us well and we loved it so much we even bought a second one a few months ago... but, owning and using them has taught us a lot about digital cams and taking pics, and we simply outgrew it...

this day is way overdue...