Iza Strikes Again!

Iza is very adept at catching tossed toys.  It is nearly impossible to hand-fake her.  At the same time, she is amazingly clumsy.  If she jumps up onto the table, she lands with the grace of a bag of sand.

So it should have been no surprise to me when she went to go from the tabletop to the half wall along the staircase.  And managed to almost go over the edge.  She didn't, but she managed to send my camera over the edge instead.  Eight feet down onto the hard wood...

When I checked it, the lens made a "geary" sound as it came out or back in.  I took a couple pictures and it seemed to work.  Then I realized that the case was slightly separated.  Pressing it firmly seemed to put it back together.  So I used it as usual (trying not to wince every time the lens made noise).

Then the lens refused to come out and there was a message about restarting the camera.  A few times of that not working I figured the camera was dead.  But there were pictures in the camera and it DID allow me to download them.  Whew!

Looking at them in iPhoto, the most recent ones (aka "after the fall") all looked a bit weird.  They were all a bit blurry.  OK, some didn't surprise me, since they were action shots of the cats (and it never has been very good at those).  But most were normal still shots.  I assume the image stabilization has been damaged.

THEN I realized that ALL the recent pictures were rotated 90 degrees!  The iPhoto software will rotate pictures, but only counter-clockwise, and NATURALLY, the camera had rotated them in that direction.  So I had to manually rotate about 50 pictures 3 times each.  And they were all a bit blurred anyway.

OK, I have to get a new camera...  I looked up subcompacts in Consumer Reports.  Quite frankly, even subcompacts are getting too fancy!  All I want is a fairly simple point and click, but one that does the point and click very well, has a better than average image stabilizer, takes good flash pictures, and has a rapid "next-shot" time (a real weakness with the current one).

I specifically didn't want top-quality video capability, a touch screen, and 20 different exposure settings, etc.  I decided on a Canon  Powershot Elph 310 HS and went to amazon.com to read more about it.  It uses an Li-Ion battery, and no matter how much I searched around, I could not find anyplace that said it was rechargable!  The replacement batteries cost $10 and I sure wasn't going to keep putting a new one in every 200 shots! 

I gave up for the night and looked again today.  I finally found that there is a battery charger included with the camera, so I went back to amazon to order it.  Would you believe the price went up $40 overnight?  Apparently, there is a newer version coming out next week (with things I do not want) and the few places that had any of the 310 version left all jacked up the price.

I looked at the other models on the Consumer Reports list, but one had a poor optical zoom, another had a touch screen, another had good video but average flash stills, etc.

I grumbled a while and ordered the 310...