… that my par­ents got me a dig­i­tal cam­era for the birth­day a few days back. It’s a Pen­tax Optio S40, has a 4MP sen­sor, 3x opti­cal zoom (and some dig­i­tal which I’ve of course dis­abled), a flash, 11MB inbuilt mem­ory (I pre­sume THAT means that there’s 16MB, 5MB of which is soft­ware stuff) and another 256MB SD card which we bought.

Every photo posted here from The Lazy Kings til now has been taken with that cam­era… yeah, I was using it before my birth­day, bad me :P

I main­tain that the other Pen­tax (SP 500 film SLR) takes bet­ter pic­tures, espe­cially at night, but it’s just so much more expen­sive to use all the time! Hav­ing said that, I’m not going to let it sink into a cup­board and dis­ap­pear: It’ll be on hand when­ever i’m plan­ning to take (good) pho­tos, whilst the new Pen­tax will be for gen­eral happy snaps and the like.

Qualms with the cam­era thus far? It didn’t come with a rechar­gable bat­tery. $90 later, and I’ve got a Sam­sung charger with killer bat­tery life, so that’s no longer a prob­lem — but it’s an expense that should be noted prior to pur­chase. Other than that, I haven’t fig­ured out how to man­u­ally adjust expo­sure, so if you’re tak­ing pho­tos at night with­out a flash (scenic shots, etc.) then it’s not a great idea. Hav­ing said that, the masssssss­si­i­i­iveee expo­sure in “Night” mode does do some cool blurry things to photos…

The expo­sure time (accord­ing to the EXIF data) on the Har­bour Bridge image is 4 sec­onds, and 1 sec­ond on the first shot (Coogee) — but it felt like lots more, because it was really windy stand­ing on the head. (No, not stand­ing on my head… that would be talent!)

Tags: digital camera, Harbour Bridge, Pentax Optio S40 Digital Camera, Pentax SP-500 35mm camera, Samsung, SLR, software stuff