Camera issues sorted

And at a sensible price, by the grace of God.

The more I looked, the more I found that the camera I already had did most of what I wanted with fewer of the flaws that I'd find in all the affordable replacements. Image noise is a big problem with modern compacts, and even causes problems in higher end stuff.

The Samsung I owned uses a 1/1.8" 8.3Mpixel senor, and produces acceptable results used at ISO400, though I prefer to shoot at 50. Most of the cameras I was looking at, even when priced >£200 were cramming 12Mpixel onto a 1/2.3" sensor and had serious noise issues, even at minimum sensitivity. The optics and focussing of the Samsung aren't fantastic, but they are quite usable, and certainly no worse than many. On Saturday I took pictures at a friends wedding - 449 shots without flash and the batteries are showing no signs of flagging. Most of the pictures were taken at either 200ASA or 400ASA due to low light, and many would be printable to 10X8 at least. I did consider a Canon G10, but the more I looked into it, the less impressed I was, and although the image stabilisation system is great and the handling excellent, many of the demonstration images were not good enough to justify D-SLR levels of expenditure.

In the end I found a used S850 on the bay, just like I already owned, that had recorded 220 shots and was as new, though without a fancy box, but with a 32Mb (hah hah) SD card. At £35 + shipping it was too good not to buy. It arrived today: see below for test shots. It's probably time to upgrade Chris's instead since it's 4 years old, and the automation is letting her down too often. A Panasonic Lumix ZX1 (£110 refurbished from the 'bay seems perfect).

Pix.....