This past week I upgraded my walkaround point-and-shoot camera. I had been using a Panasonic Lumix TZ1 – a fine camera with a long-zoom – and I traded up for a Lumix ZS3. One of my chief concerns about a new camera was size; the TZ1 is not large by any stretch, but something like a tiny Canon PowerShot sounded appealing.
But when it came down to it I was convinced that the ZS3 was for me… and my first few days with it have been great, too. It is a pretty amazing device when you step back and think about it. It’s roughly the size of my first iPod, a 20GB model that itself was the size of a deck of cards. And in this package the camera has a 12x optical zoom, 3cm macro mode, 720p HD movie recording (up to an hour with an 8GB SDHC card), Dolby stereo, face recognition, face tracking, baby modes (which tracks a child’s age if you give it a DOB), and all the other usual camera-y goodness. And somehow I was thinking all this was too big?
We really do live in the future now. Between smartphones, iPods, wireless data, and the web there’s so much good stuff out there, and we get to enjoy it. That’s pretty great, isn’t it?
And remember, everything is amazing… and no one is happy.
Posted in Technology