Saturday, December 30, 2006

Pump Up The Jam


When I woke up this morning, everything was foggy. And while this stuff usually burns off by nine at the latest, today it was there until almost twelve at which point everything cleared up.


Quinn had a birthday party to attend today. It was at Pump It Up. Not a bad place for a party. The kids literally wear themselves out running around on all the blow up stuff. There are a couple of different rooms that you migrate through as the party progresses. Each room has three giant inflatable things. Both rooms have an obstacle course and a slide. The third item in one was a basketball court and in the other it was something akin to a circular race track. Quinn was entertained the entire time and seemed to have a ton of fun. And they have one rule for the slides that's basically don't go down head first. Guess who ended up doing that multiple times. Don't worry, as a responsible parental unit I made sure I told him not to do that (*cough* while the staff was watching *cough*).


This party also gave me my first real test of my new camera that I was given for Christmas by my Uncle Frank. The camera is a Nikon Coolpix S7c, and no, I didn't request it, he just bought what he thought was good. There are good and bad things about it. The good is it's slim. It can easily fit in my pocket so I no longer have to lug the huge D70 around if I want a camera with me when I'm out and about. The other good thing is the display. The display on this thing is freakin' huge. It's basically the entire back of the camera. The bad things are shutter lag. It's up there. Not quite a second in good light, but probably over half a second (I've noticed the lag gets worse as the lighting conditions get worse). Continuous shots aren't really continuous (I'm used to being able to do about 3 / sec on the D70, so anything more than 1 a second doesn't count as continuous as far as I'm concerned). And it doesn't seem to do well in low light high action shots (the shots I did take in those combined conditions seemed a bit grainy). Overall, it's a nice camera to be able to take along with me when I want a camera but don't want to deal with the size constraint of the D70, but it certainly won't be replacing my D70.

1 comment:

Scott said...

As to the new camera, I'm pretty sure you'll find (as I do with mine) that there is considerable digital noise and lack of depth, especially with low-light pictures. But the compactness I guess is the tradeoff for that, since I can take my camera anywhere with ease.