My Digital Cameras

This is a new blog that will contain experiences, views, opinions and reviews, both personal and subjective, on the digital cameras I purchase. I tend to buy a lot of cameras, so there should be new stuff appearing on this blog fairly often.

The kind of cameras I buy are generally the small low cost digital video cameras, that record onto some kind of flash memory. You see I am on a quest to find the perfect portable digital camera. It is a quest that I don't believe will be successful for a while, but will be at least entertaining along the way.

I thought I would begin this blog with a picture of me. Taken with the iJoy by MobiDV. It isn't very good, but it is all I could come up with on short notice.

About Me: I am 55 this year, and I have been a tech nerd since highschool. I am a software manager by profession. I have spent many years as a software developer, using an obscure language called Forth. Some of you might know me by some of my earlier projects, like F-PC and Win32Forth. I have been interested in photography for most of my life, and owned many cameras during that time. The last few years, I have been riding motorcycles, and had a desire to always have a camera with me to photograph the various events I attend. Thus began a quest with no forseeable end, as I search for the ideal pocketable digital camera with decent video capability.

I should also mention that I am an Apple snob. I used and developed software for PCs, but I prefer Macintosh computers. This leads me to have a serious dislike for any digital cmaera that produces ASF (Microsoft specific) files that cannot easily be manipulated on a Macintosh. Yes, I do know that programs like VLC allow some ASF files to be viewed on a Mac, but I want to make DVDs and web videos that most people can read, including Macintosh owners. So, I prefer Quicktime compatible cameras, and AVI compatible cmaeras that produce files that can be converted to a format that is useful on a Macintosh.

The bigest complaint I have with the packaging of many digital cameras, is that you can't tell by reading the package if they produce .AVI files, or .ASF files. They all say they produce MPEG4, but as many of you know, one person's MPEG4 is another person's unreadable, useless .ASF file.