ooooooo shiny
Well, having looked at a few cameras and been reading up for weeks I’ve ended up with the safe bet. I’ve bought a A95. It doesn’t have the huge zoom I wanted but given the only real times I want a long zoom are for motor sport I need a *fast* lens and/or image stabilisation. Neither come cheap - not if they are any good :-(.
The A95 is small(ish) and light(ish). It only has a 3x zoom but is a half decent lens and it has a completely manual mode - something I really missed from my Fuji. Also, in darkish rooms (pubs for example) it makes a half decent attempt at focusing - something the Fuji was particularly shite at. And if it can’t focus then at least there is a manual option albeit with no focus ring (thats gonna take a bit of getting used to!). Still, at least with 5mp there is a hope of being able to get away with a bit of cropping. Still nowhere near as nice to use in manual mode as my old EOS but at least it’s now an option!
the others in my short list were:
- Lumix DMC-FZ20 Uber sexy but too heavy to pocket. Excellent lens with a whopping 12x zoom and half decent IS but the sheer amount of glass makes it too heavy. It’s also approaching the price of an EOS digital body…
- Powershot S1 IS Big lens with IS. Slow, and plasticy though. Also crap at low light focusing :-(.
- DiMAGE Z5 Not bad. Just something about it I didn’t like. Dunno what exactly but it just didn’t “feel” right. Also, very poor focusing in low light.
So in the end I went for the cheapest of the cameras I had been looking for. Jessops price matched to bring the price under 200 quid as well so it ended up being half what I was thinking of paying. Now if only it had a filter thread…
Maybe next time I’ll go for the 350D 
March 27th, 2005 at 3:00 pm
I used to have an olympus OM-101, which had something called “power focus”, which was manual focus, but electrically operated from a thumbwheel. It gained you none of the advantages of autofocus, but still needed costly AF lenses.
It was actually a real pain in the arse. It’d probably have been quite nice as an *addition* to autofocus, though
That camera did have the best viewfinder I’ve ever had the pleasure of using, though.
March 29th, 2005 at 5:46 pm
that’ll be this thing then I guess. A bit of a strange beast by the sound of it