A few basic notes from my visit tonight at Best Buy
AMAZON KINDLES
The Fire is nice especially for it’s price, but it’s really only suitable for casual intermittent internet browsing. If you’re looking to supplant a computer for basic tasks like email and internet, then you’re better off with the iPad. The Fire is simply too small to use as a main means for internet surfing. I can see commuters digging this thing.
I was surprised how thin and and incredibly light the e-ink Kindles are. I still prefer the tangibility of printed books. If I’m going to invest time into reading a book, then I want to keep it on my shelf as a sort of trophy when I’m done reading it. I also am a big marginalia note taker. I played around with the note tool on the Kindle and it’s really not the same as a hand-written note.
CAMERAS
The Nikon P500 is pretty flipping cool. The aperture priority mode is incredibly easy to use. Switch the top dial to “A”. And then use the command dial on the back to dial up or down your aperture. That’s it. Super easy. And the aperture/shutter speed settings change on the fly on the LCD screen. I just wish the ISO settings were easily accessible. They were buried in menu options. I don’t know of any non-SLR camera that has easy access to ISO settings. That always befuddled me. Aperture, shutter speed, and ISO are the three ingredients for cameras. Why hide the third ingredient? Oh, the camera also has a 31x optical zoom. Seriously. Sick. They should have built in a pop-out tripod on that thing.
Speaking of pop-up trickery, tomorrow’s post will cover a camera with some really funny pop-uppedness.
I quickly glanced at Sony, Nikon and another brand’s mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras. They’re cute, but I just don’t really get them. They come nowhere close to the portability of the ultracompact and compacts on the market. So you can’t carry them in your pocket despite Nikon’s awkward claim in their Ashton Kutcher commercial. And they don’t come close to the quality you get from a Nikon or Canon SLR camera. So what’s the point? I suppose if you carry a decent-sized bag with you all the time, then you can have the camera in there. Otherwise, if you’re going to go to the effort of consciously carrying a MIL camera, then you might as well be carrying an SLR and get far superior image quality. Don’t buy into Sony’s campaign that the images are SLR quality because they’re simply not; at least when you get into ISOs beyond 400.