Boys' toys

I very recently splashed out on a new compact camera, the Fuji FinePix S5700. With 7.1 Mega Pixies and 10x Optical Zoom (yes, 10!) it's a bit of a step up from the Olympus Mju 400 I've been using for the past few years.

The Mju with its metal body was, and still is, a cracking little go-anywhere camera, but after 4 years of being with me every day it was time for a replacement. Funnily enough I had thought I'd had it for longer but I've just checked Amazon and found that I bought it in May 2004 for £185.24 which was a good price at the time. With 4 Megapixels and 3x Optical Zoom it was not exactly cutting edge, but it wasn't too far behind for the time when I seem to remember 5 Megapixel was about the best you could get without needing a bank loan!

While in Marseilles the other week, the Mju started playing up, with it taking several attempts to shut down almost every time I tried to switch it off unless, curiously enough, I was trying to demonstrate this fault to RE in which case it worked first time every time! A couple of weeks prior to this the latch of the door covering the memory card & USB port had become broken and I had sourced a replacement for £10 and fitted it.

So onto Amazon, and a few searches later I identified the FinePix S5700 as the one for me. It's been replaced by the S5800 but the reviews say there is nothing much to choose between them so the lower price of the older version won. Reduced from Amazon's price of £199 to £104. Not bad. It also seems to be about that price elsewhere too, because I was looking at camera bags in Curry's today and the bloke next to me was also looking for one for his brand new S5700 bought today from Argos for £100! In fact, having just looked up Amazon in order to post a link to the S5700 at the top of this page, I see it's reduced (at the time of typing this) to just over £97!

It's a different style from the Mju, being somewhat larger and therefore not quite as easy to carry about in a pocket everywhere, but the Mju is still working, albeit a bit sick, so I can still carry it with me but use the S5700 for "proper" shots when necessary.

So, potentially there may be more of my own photos uploaded here in due course, or I may just start using Flickr more often and just link to it from a post.