FujiFilm FinePix S5200

The FujiFilm FinePix S5200 is a great camera. We got ours back in March 2006 and love it. There are a few minor complaints that I'll get to later, but overall it is a great camera for anyone wanting a step up from a point and shoot. It has auto focus (and manual focus that I can't quite figure out yet), optical zoom (10x), built in flash, full auto mode all the way through full manual mode. The auto mode lets you use it as a point and shoot...where it determines the shutter aperture settings automatically. You can flip it to shutter priority or aperture priority if you want a bit more control over those items.

The biggest bonus in my book is the fact that it shoots in the Camera Raw format. Each 5 megapixel file is about 10MB, which is HUGE compared to it's 2MB JPEG counterpart. The benefit here is there is absolutely no compression on the file written to your XDPicture card media. This gives you ultimate control over the image in post-processing. You have about 4 f-stops worth of exposure control after the picture is taken. Now for those who simply want to take a picture, and upload it to the computer....this is not a very efficient way to go. If you do like to play around with the images in Photoshop, this is the best way to go. You have to download the latest update for Photoshop for it to read the RAW (file extension is RAF) files, but it works great.

I prefer shooting RAW because I think the S5200 has too many compression artifacts and image smoothing when shooting in JPEG mode. It's a pain to get the files ready for emailing when shooting RAW, but it's worth the hassle in my opinion. The S5200 also seems to shoot everything a little too blue for my eye and I like the fact that I can adjust color temperature to make the pictures more true to life.....without recompressing the file.

The things that bug me about the camera:
1) Color temperature seems too blue in auto
2) Has a hard time focusing sometimes in low light or on moving objects
3) JPEG images have too much image smoothing and artifacts
4) Seems to take a bit too long to to write the image to the media...this means you can't easily take a quick sequence of shots.
5) Images get too grainy/noisy at 800 and 1600 ISO

The things I really like about the camera:
1) Shoots in the RAW format
2) Has great battery life (4x AA batteries)
3) Good video quality at 640x480 30fps
4) Great image quality when shooting RAW
5) Standard 55mm lens thread so you can use filters from other cameras

Read more detailed info here at Photoxels. Another good source of information is here at DPReview. I would highly recommend this camera if you're looking for an upgrade from a point and shoot.

U3 USB Flash Drives

Several months ago I was looking for a larger capacity USB Flash drive to take files to and from work so I could work on them from home. I found a Kingston 1GB drive for $20 at Buy.com so I started researching it. It had something called 'U3' technology which I didn't know anything about. What it allows you to do is run programs straight off the keychain sized flash memory stick as though it was a CD-ROM. There are several programs for these U3 drives and a lot of the most useful ones are free.

This allows you to load a web browser on your keychain and take it to any Windows XP machine and surf the web anonymously. No cookies or form data is saved to the host computer....it all goes on the keychain. So when you unplug the U3 keychain, it's like you were never there.

Web browsers, email clients, chat programs, office document reader/editors, photo viewers/editors are all available for free. If you need a new Flash drive and you work on Windows XP, definitely get a U3 drive.

The one complaint I have about my Kingston drive is that the little plastic part that connects to my keychain breaks all the time. I have to super glue it once every couple weeks. That is annoying. Other than that, I like it a lot. 1GB for $20 that also lets me take my email, favorite website links and chat programs with me wherever I go is great!!