jciv’s blog

Canon PowerShot A540 & S3 IS

My mom has been talking about wanting a camera and it was her birthday so I figured why not kill two birds with one stone. She gets a camera and I get to try out one of the new Canon models. I could easily have gone with a cheaper model, but I found a pretty good deal on the Canon A540 (six megapixels), $36 below average street price and free shipping. Most reviews say it is worth the extra cost over the very similar A530 (five megapixels).

It seems to me that the A540 shares at least some of the new hardware being used in the Canon SI S3 that I want. Reviews of the S3 have not been so great because it is basically the same as the S2. You get one more megapixel but they say ISO 400 is less sensitive than it used to be on the S2 (because now it is a more correct measure) and ISO 800 is basically unusable. After trying out the A540 I agree, 800 is basically unusable unless you really must have the picture and don’t care about the quality. And even then it doesn’t seem much better than the old S2’s 400 in the dark though that is with image stabilization so hard to compare directly.

Full reviews of the S3 are now up at dpreview.com and dcresource.com. Both have some pretty good comparisons photos from the S3 and the S2. While I still think it is a great camera, I have decided (for now) it is not worth upgrading from my S2. But if my S2 died, the S3 certainly would be on the top of my list.

Back to the A540, other than ISO 800 being so noisy most people will never use it and the long flash refresh time, it is a nice little camera. I would prefer a bit more zoom, but you know I am addicted to my 12x. For most people 4x would be good enough. I really like the size, I was a bit shocked when I saw how small it was. It would be a bit of a bulge in your pocket, but it would certainly fit. It makes my S2 look giant. I miss the image stabilization of the S2. Without it, the camera is not very useful indoors without the flash. But few cameras in its class have any kind of image stabilization.

One of the reasons I went with the A540 was it had an optical view finder. My mom can hardly use my camera because she has trouble moving focusing between the fold out LCD and the subject for aiming. The viewfinder of the S2 is also an LCD, so she thought a viewfinder like a real camera would be better. Turns out the optical viewfinder isn’t much better. Part of it has to do with her bifocals, but I am not sure all of it can be blamed on that. I don’t really like the viewfinder since I am used to the LCD live preview, but I don’t have a problem using it.

You can read more on the A540 at dcresource.com and CNet.

Add comment May 29th, 2006

Font Matching

I have been doing some more graphic editing. This time placing my cousin’s face in the poster for one of her favorite old movies. To go a bit further, I then started looking for the font used so I could match it and add her name. The first place I tried was Identifont, there you answer questions about characteristics of the font and it narrows down its database. The second place I tried was WhatTheFont, with this site you send in an image and it attempts to find the most similar font in its apparently much larger database.

The first site gave me 30 possible results, with the first being Arial. That greatly lowered my expectations of success. Based on the questions I answered, Arial is similar but not close to what I wanted. Some of the rest were much closer and finally I found one that looks to be a close relative if not a perfect match.

But just to make sure, I ran the font by WhatTheFont and got five possible results. All were similar, but none were as good a match as Identifont had given me. I was a bit surprised.

The trouble now that I found the font is they aren’t cheep. I don’t think this project is worth spending $49 on a font. I will have to dig through my old font disks and see if I have something similar or maybe I will get lucky and already have it. Years ago I used to collect fonts, I had so many I was choking Windows 3.1 with them. That was until I learned how just having too many fonts takes a lot of memory and slows Windows.

Add comment May 26th, 2006

Photography Stuff

I just read an interesting digital camera story on Wired. It is not the first on this topic I have seen lately. According to this and the other article, camera manufacturers are having to come up with more innovation than just increasing megapixels now that most consumer cameras have reached high enough for most people. And that innovation is a really good thing for consumers.

From this article I discovered this really nice looking camera, the Panasonic DMC-TZ1K. It is a super zoom in a compact body. It uses folded optics, whatever that is.

I have also tried out Riya recently. It uses face recognition technology to automatically tag people in your photos so you can better search your collection. It of course requires training, but in the little testing I did, it did a pretty good job.

Add comment May 11th, 2006