Good news and bad news

The bad news is that I lost my digital camera on my flight down from St. Louis to Fort Meyers FL. I changed planes in Orlando and when I got to the Fort Meyers airport I realized I didn’t have my camera. It is was a Sony ultracompact, so it fit nicely in my back pocket. I guess it still IS a Sony ultracompct, it just doesn’t fit in MY pocket any more.

I filed a report with the lost baggage folks at Southwest Airlines and the nice lady there made a few calls but no one turned it in. She took my number and said she’d call me if someone did. No calls. The worst part about it was that I had taken pictures of the grandkids while in Kansas City last weekend, and didn’t downlaod them to my PC.

The good news… I ordered a new camera. It’s a Sony T-200 with quite an array of features:
First off, the DSC-T200 has a nice 3.5" LCD screen. To make it even better, it is a touchscreen. More on this in a moment. Secondly, it does high def. Ok, so now to some of the neat features. Getting back to the touchscreen. You might be imagining that the touchscreen will allow you to select on-screen menus and what not with your finger. True. But it does more than that. You are actually able to simply touch the screen area that you want to focus on, and the camera focuses on that area. As recently as this past weekend, a picture I went to shoot with my previous camera was blurry. Why, because as I quickly went to shoot it so not to lose the moment, the camera focused on the handrail of my deck, rather than on the people playing in the driveway. I'm looking forward to the ability to focus via touch.

The camera also has face detection and smile detection. You can read all about it here, but let me say, this is incredibly cool stuff and practical. You can test is as well using the interactive flash demo too. I like the ability to select a face and have the camera not take a picture until that person smiles. This will be fantastic for shooting pictures of my kids. My youngest often needs to be cajoled into smiling for the camera. With the DSC-T200, you know the picture won't be snapped until a smile appears. Totally awesome.

Outside of the above "techy" features, the camera sports a good lens with a 5X optical zoom and a 25X digital zoom. Sony has used a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens, which is an outstanding lens. This model is an 8.1 megapixel camera similar CCD as the T100, which has been reviewed a producing great looking pictures.

For more info and a neat interactive flash demo click the link below.

Camera description via

Update: Links corrected and/or removed. But they all work if you click this link.