Here are the two new lanterns I ordered and the Spirit Halloween one. Based on the pictures, I was expecting two different shapes and colors, but I guess “actual products may vary.”
Old Lantern (Battery Operated) Item 138511 or N0173 by Seasons USA Inc.
Haunted Lantern – Battery Operated w/Sound Item 181774 or 19668 by Seasons USA Inc.
Bloody Rustic Lantern Item 01001189 from Spirit Halloween

Here are all three lit up to compare their brightness.

And here is what I thought the Old Lantern looked like. If anyone finds one with the longer glass like this, let me know. I like the style.

I don’t really like products with sound because they are usually stupid, but in that case I just disconnect the speaker. The Haunted Lantern is mostly screams, wind, thunder, and what might be crackling noise from a wood burning fire (which is incorrect for a lantern). Not sure if I will disable the sound on this one or not. The flame and sound are motion activated and it is dim compared to the other lanterns so it may go unnoticed without the sound. I use my stuff outdoors and its dark so motion sensors rarely work for me. Not sure what I am going to do about that. Luckily it comes with a try me button that I might be able to extend the cable and trigger it manually. I would not recommend the one with sound unless you are using it in an area with enough light to set off a motion sensor and you like stuff with sound.

Other than the blood spatter, I like the paint job on the Spirit Halloween one, but all three are very similarly antiqued and the difference could be all up to who slaps the paint on during production. All three open just like a real oil lantern would, but the LED bulb is glued in place. On the two non LED lanterns, you can change the bulb if it burns out by opening it as if you were cleaning a real oil lantern. For my needs, the plain cheap one is the best at only $9 from Halloween24.com.

These antique style Halloween lanterns appear very similar to the Deitz #76 Original Cold Blast Lantern. Though its slightly smaller, you can buy the real oil burning one for $17 in red, blue, or green. Of course, for safety purposes a battery powered one is much prefered for Halloween. Deitz makes some of those too, an LED lantern in the same style for $25 in black and a more powerful LED latnern with almost as much candle power as the real oil lantern of that style.

For our recent possible hurricane, I bought a Lamplight Emergency Lighting Kit with a very similar looking (non-Deitz) lantern for around $17 which is much brighter than a Halloween decoration. It is the reason I decided to start looking for lanterns to add to my yard haunt this year.

Of course, for all the stuff I have mentioned you have to be in Manual mode. I have never messed with the scene modes much. It isn’t really manual compared to a more complicated camera so don’t worry too much about that. I have not used them, but on recent ELPHs there is a kids and pets and/or a sports setting in the scene menu which should give faster shutter speeds.

You can turn the exposure down so the camera doesn’t expect as much light and will use a faster shutter speed. But you loose DOF that way and your shots will be darker. You probably can’t go too far down.

You should also zoom the least amount possible, none is best. The wider the shot the more light is let in so the camera can use a faster shutter speed. Wider shots also help catching your subject. Mine is usually jumping cats and it helps make sure I get the whole cat in the shot.

Setting your ISO to at least 200 is probably a requirement for catching fast action unless in the brightest sunlight. The higher the ISO the less light the camera needs so can use a faster shutter, but the image gets noisier the higher the ISO. Don’t be afraid of 400 if you have too, grainy shots are better than blury shots. Sunlight is extremely important if you don’t want motion blur. If you can live with a small amount of motion blur, which can sometimes be interesting and shows the action, then a bit shady or not so bright sunlight will do. Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.

Your other option is to use the flash even in daylight, just turn your camera from automatic to always flash. It will slow down how fast you can shoot and you will probably want an extra battery if you do it a lot since it will drain much faster, but it will help you freeze the action if you are close enough to the subject. Here is an example in the dark. And another example (don’t look if you are mouse fan).

If you get blurry pictures with the flash because the shutter is staying open too long you might have the Slow Synchro setting turned on. You can turn it off in the Menu. It could also happen if you are too far from your subject for the flash to have much effect. For example, when shooting an event from the stands flash (on any camera) isn’t going to do you any good. You are better off with high ISO.

The image quality is good, but I prefer my old Minolta 50mm f2.8 1:1 Macro since the focal range is more useful for non-macro shots and it doesn’t require an adapter for 1:1 so it is much more likely to stay on my camera. Until I got the 50mm, I prefered using a Raynox macro adapter on my zoom lenses instead of the Cosina for shooting macros. Since I was using an adapter either way, I preferred the flexibility of the Raynox DCR-250 which I could use on any of my lenses.

After using the 50mm for a few years, I wish I had a macro lens with 90mm or more so I could shoot from a bit further away. Scaring bugs off isn’t usually a problem for me, but lighting them with my flash at 1:1 can be difficult since the lens is so close to the bug.

There is much other browsers can learn from Chrome, but I think
Chrome is too simplified for most advanced users and those are the people who will most appreciate the big improvements. Having tabs in separate processes seems to be a very good idea. And being able to disconnect and reconnect tabs is convenient. Memory usage does seem pretty comparable to Firefox 3.

Popups and spyware problems are not improved much, if any, over Firefox 3. It does block some popups, but I still found plenty. One seemed triggered by Flash ads. I got one when clicking unrelated links on a hacker search engine. And I got one that seems to be a javascript redirect on a compromised blog that warned me I had viruses and is very effective. The same site twice convinced my mom that she had viruses. If you click anywhere on the site, two EXEs are downloaded automatically. With Firefox, only one was downloaded. The only thing Chrome did better was not allow the site to hide the browser window by resizing it and moving it to the corner behind the popup dialog. Firefox can be set for that too.

Chrome is missing an easy way to reopen accidentally closed tabs. You can do it from the Opera Speed Dial like home page, but why not from the context menu when you click on the tab bar? Having close buttons on each tab makes it too easy to close them. I set Firefox to show close buttons only on the active tab.

I didn’t do any official timing tests, but to me Chrome feels slower than Firefox. Loading javascript heavy pages might be faster, Gmail did load pretty fast, but loading regular HTML and images seemed slower.

The best part of Chrome is that it will advance web standards. Google’s Chrome comic explains how they test page rendering automatically on tons of the most popular pages found in their search engine. Any improvement they make will be able to benefit Apple Safari’s WebKit core which eventually works its way back KDE’s KHTML in Konqueror.

Chrome is an extremely polished beta, but if you use anything more than the back button on your browser, there is nothing really great about it that will convince people to switch. IE8 beta looks pretty good too, but I will be sticking with Firefox. Mozilla keeps actively working on Firefox. From past experience with Google software, I wouldn’t be surprised if they get board with the project and development stalls for long periods. Google’s Browser Sync was long neglected and is being discontinued. Google’s Picasa is finally nearing a beta for 3.0 but has not had a major update since June 2006 when 2.5 was released. Hopefully this one is better, but take a look at their Mac and Linux support if you are waiting for this browser on other operating systems.

Update: I gave Chrome another try after it was developed a bit more and started using it more and more. I love the speed improvements and use it 90% of the time now even though I miss a bunch of Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey scripts.