[SGVLUG] Camera recommendations?

[Dustin]

So much good advice on this thread that I'm going to respond en mass:

All the love for the Powershot series is interesting, since it was a
Powershot A70 that I seem to have left for the bears and coyotes to use. I
didn't realize they were so popular, but I must have done way better than
I thought when I bought it.

The one I lost was the first digital camera I've owned, so I didn't know
what features I should look for, but I always liked it except for the
shutter delay.  I thought maybe this time I would know what I want and
could buy specifically to get that number down, but this amazing site

http://www.imaging-resource.com/

has detailed enough timing statistics to tell me that the Powershot series
is actually exceptionally quick if you prefocus.  So I think you all are
right, I probably won't be happier if I get something else.  I'm just
spoiled expecting the same response time as a film camera.  I also got
lucky on the other features you guys mentioned, excellent points I didn't
understand to look for when I bought it: AA batteries and CF cards.  I
didn't know the CF cards were an open spec, but I noticed they're much
cheaper than some of the others and they're small enough that making them
smaller is almost *less* convenient (the SD card in my videocam is almost
loseable).

I once thought that the newer, faster cards would be a plus in getting
down the shot-to-shot time, but I've since learned that the bottleneck for
cheapie consumer point-and-shoots is the camera's processor anyway, not
the card bandwidth, so if they've moved away from CF in the newer
Powershots that's really too bad.  I just looked and a half-GB CF card can
be had for like $45-$50, but a half-GB xD card was $70 from the same
place.

What really hurts is losing not only the camera, but two or three of those
expensive high-capacity CF cards (plus a set of AA rechargables and, worst
of all, some pictures that hadn't been uploaded yet).

When I first got it I used gphoto2 a couple of times to download the
pictures, so the Powershots seem to be Linux-compatible that way in spite
of Canon, but I agree that it's not a big point.  Once I bought a
cardreader I found that so much more convenient that Yet Another Cable
that I never hooked the camera up directly again.

I also thought about moving away from Canon because they are rather snippy
about Linux support (by contrast with Epson, which cooperated enough for
my scanner to have great support, and HP, which wrote and maintains the
GPL'd driver for my photoprinter), but since the camera worked great
without their help I'm not going to accept much technical compromise to
make the point.

Speaking of which, am I the only one who tends to email manufacturers
about their Linux support just to let them know we're here?  I don't
bother on, say, network cards, since I know they do it for good economic
reasons, but I often do on consumer gadgets.  I've sent nice thank-you
letters to Epson and HP, and one to Canon and Plextor telling them I like
their hardware very much but tend to avoid it because of the support issue
(I'd very likely own one of the great Canon photoprinters otherwise, and I
like my Plextor DVD-RW drive but they've been stupidly nasty to
open-source development recently).  I don't know that it makes a
difference, but one day I decided maybe it was part of my obligation to
the community to remind the hardware manufacturers that we exist and buy
expensive digital toys too.

Thanks again,

Dustin