Brighter Fusion Blog

Hi again everyone,

Well I got a great new camera this year for Christmas. It’s a Canon Powershot SX110 IS in black. The screen is humongous and in general it’s giving me the same superb performance as my old Canon (the Powershot A85) did in the areas of focus and color rendition. It does seem to go too yellow in crappy indoor lighting, but that’s something I might be able to correct in the settings.

The camera’s 9 megapixel and has a 10X optical zoom. Pretty kickin’.

The real news is the magical card that I got with it — the Eye-Fi Home. This looks like a simple SD card on the outside, but some wizard was able to fit a Wi-Fi antenna inside it along with a 2 GB memory chip. As a result, all I need to do to make practical use of my new pictures is to turn on my camera for a minute or two after I get home. The chip detects my home network and offloads the pics to my laptop’s hard drive. It simultaneously uploads the pics to Google’s Picasa photo service as well, into private albums sorted by date taken. I could, in fact, wander by any open network with my camera turned on and my images would upload to Picasa as long as I’m in range. Can you imagine how fabulous that would be for adventure travelers? Also very handy if my camera ever gets stolen or lost.

I had to pay $10 a year for the Picasa uploading, but I passed on the $15 a year geotagging service. If it were based on real GPS, I’d be more tempted. Also, I never go anywhere interesting.

FYI, if you buy a card right now, I’d recommend the “Share” card from Amazon at $70 as the best deal. That includes the $10 a year web share service for free. They have a dozen or so supported services you could upload to, not just Picasa. If you don’t care about money, then go get the Anniversary edition, with 4 GB and web sharing (but no free geotagging), or the Explore with web sharing and geotagging (but only 2 GB storage). Any of the cards can be upgraded with any of the services for a yearly fee.

Well, that’s about it for the camera report. I’m happy.

Alas, it is difficult to show you a picture of my camera or my SD card without using my camera or my SD card. I’m too lazy to go use someone else’s camera and connect the USB cable to move pictures around. Geez, how did I live like that before? Oh yeah. I just left the pics on the camera’s card for months and never showed them to anybody.

Speaking of which, I’m following this up with links to some Picasa albums that I just set up, including some ancient pics I finally offloaded from my old camera’s CF card before I gave it away.