I did it! I bought a digital camera!

Okay, I actually bought the camera about a week ago - won it on eBay. (I only bid on things on eBay if the person selling them is an agent for a real business, for those of you who are worried about me sending large hunks of money off into the wild blue yonder. I've never been burned, but K.T. was, and I try to learn from the mistakes of others...)

Anyway, for those of you who are curious:

• It's a Sony Digital Mavica, MVC-FD73. (The link takes you to the write-up for the FD71, but it's the same camera. I haven't been able to figure out what the difference is.)
• I paid about $500 for it, which was what it would have cost me at Circuit City if they'd had it in stock. I don't know why the FD71 retails for $700 and the FD73 for $500.
• If I'm taking standard-quality pictures, I can get about 25 pictures on a single floppy. I took some high-quality pictures just to see, but aside from slightly better color quality, there isn't a lot of difference between the high quality mode and the standard.
• Very happy with it, thanks.

It's got several different save modes, including one called e-mail, which is pretty much pointless if you have any kind of graphics software at all: In addition to the 640x480 image, it saves a 320x240 image for you to send via e-mail. I think it could be useful if it saved only the smaller image, but both? How ridiculous.

But I'm very happy to have it. I'm sure it'll be my favorite toy for the next few weeks. Since one of my major rationalizations for buying the thing is the house we're building, I decided to drive over to the lot immediately after work yesterday to take some pictures to post on my House page. It's about ten miles from the office to the new house. I'd gone about six miles when I realized that I had forgotten the battery. The battery for the camera is a rechargeable lithium battery which had arrived with about half an hour left on it, so after playing with the camera a bit, I'd plugged the battery in to recharge. And left it.

So I turned around and drove back to the office and got the battery, muttering under my breath the whole time. Finally, I got back to the lot, popped the battery into the camera, and powered it up. All the little displays came on, and I aimed the camera at the house.

The little LCD screen that shows me what the picture will look like was black. No image.

I thought maybe I hadn't hit the power button correctly, but no - all the little displays were showing, just no picture. I adjusted the brightness level of the LCD. Nothing. I was beginning to panic when I realized that... Well of course you saw it coming... I'd left the lens cap on.

Stop laughing. I've never had a camera that had a lens cap before.

So I took some pictures of the house, as you can see if you followed the above link, and then I went home and took some more pictures, of the afghan I finished a few weeks ago and of a miniature I painted and of the cat (lots of pictures of the cat) and of Matt and... Just about anything I could point the camera at, actually.

Somebody said to me yesterday that they expected the digital camera to replace the film camera soon. I don't think that's true. Certainly not for the casual user. $500 is a lot of money to shell out at one time, and the pictures are not - let us be honest - not the best quality. When it comes to important events, I'll be using my film camera again, because the quality of print I can get with film is so much higher than the quality of a digital camera. Let's put it this way. If you take a print and scan it in, a 3-by-5-inch picture loses no quality if you scan it in at a resolution of 900 dpi, which is to say, 2700x4500 pixels. The best digital cameras out there - which cost in the neighborhood of $5,000 and are used only by professional photographers, might be able to match this (I didn't bother researching any cameras which cost more than my car), but the consumer cameras, which range from $250 - $1,000, can not. And that's just scanning in a small print; if you take the negative for that print and create a bigger print, the quality doesn't change appreciably.

So, next summer when I go to my brother's wedding, I'll be taking my film camera with me, because those are pictures that I'd like to have of the highest quality possible. But for hanging out and having fun, I think the digital camera is a great idea. I'll never have to buy film for this camera, or pay for developing. If I take a picture and hate the way it turns out, I just delete it and try again. No extra costs, so I don't have to worry about taking "worthless" pictures. Nothing else to buy, ever.

Except maybe a spare battery.