I ordered my Christmas present today. Yep, my present. From Brian. Maybe that’s the way it works after a quarter century of marriage, but who knew? Actually, it’s not like he didn’t have any say in the decision making process. A few weeks ago, I gave him one very specific gift idea. I picked something out, sent him a link to the best online price, and even gave him a coupon code to save some extra money. Since he said he didn’t have any idea what to get me, I thought that was pretty helpful. But, it was a boxing bag (for exercise purposes, you know), and with my history of carpal tunnel, he thought it wasn’t a good idea. Could be he’s right, but I don’t think so. Either way, he decided it wasn’t something he was going to buy for me, so there went a perfectly good gift idea out the window. I may have to buy my own eventually, but for now I guess I’ll make do with the Wii.
At any rate, that still left Brian needing a gift idea. He knew I’d been wanting a new pocket camera for a year, since my old one bit the dust last December, so he started asking about what sort of features I wanted and all. We looked at some in a couple of stores while we were out and about, and even made a special trip up to the camera store to check out some others. But a camera isn’t really something you can just rush in to, so it took a while. Brian said I spent more time picking out the camera than I did my last car. I imagine that’s true, but, really, the make and model of the car was pre-determined, so all I had to decide was color and trim level; that stuff is easy. But zoom levels, low light capabilities, and print quality? That stuff takes a while, especially when you want to jam it all in to a tiny little package.
So, yeah, there’s a lot to consider, but it’s fun look at all of it, especially all the cool demo pictures. My “big” cameras have always been Sonys, but I’ve never used one of their compacts, so I looked at a few of those. I read a comparison review article that put a Fujifilm model at the top of the pack, so I checked them out, and I compared some of the Nikons and Canons. But, ultimately, I ended up with a Panasonic. That was the make of my last compact, and I was very happy with it. There have been some differences in the intervening years, of course, and not all of them are to my liking, but I still decided it had the best overall feature set that I was looking for. Plus, it’s red, it’s cute, and Brian will do the wrapping so it will be waiting for me under the tree on Christmas morning. Maybe doing your own shopping isn’t such a bad deal after all.
