So, this afternoon I used my seven Best Buy gift cards, worth a combined total of $356.24 (thanks, Mom & Dad, Patty, Casey, Ginny & Ted!), to buy a new digital camera! Hooray! Say good-bye to PowerShot A60 and hello to PowerShot A95!

Canon should really pay me a commission. :) In addition to faithfully buying their cameras, I’m always talking them up and encouraging my friends to buy them. Seriously, the PowerShot line is great! And my old extension lenses (telephoto and wide-angle) will still work with my new camera.

Anyway, aside from the LCD flip screen (visible in the lower picture), which is very cool, the major difference between the A60 and the A95 is the resolution. The former is a 2-megapixel camera; the latter, 5 megapixels. For website purposes, this will make little difference in most situations, since I shrink images anyway (usually to 640×480) before uploading them. But in situations where I want to crop a small portion of the image and upload only that portion, it can make a big difference.

You can see, for example, that there is little difference in resolution between this A60 image and this A95 image (although the latter has more contrast; not sure why)… but once I zoom in a bit, you can start to see the difference between old and new… and when I zoom in closer, you can really tell: the old camera can’t even make a 640×480 image out of this portion of the image, but with the new camera it’s full size and looks great. Woohoo! :)

Anyway… I’m sure I’ll be oohing and aahing over the camera for a while, as I take new, cool pictures. In the mean time, here’s the newly updated Winter Break gallery, some taken by the A60 and some by the A95.

Becky will probably take over the A60, by the way. She has her own A60, but it has some issues with regard to recognizing memory cards. If we can work out those issues such that it’s functional again, one camera or the other will probably go on the market. Two friends have already made inquiries… :)