May 1, 2003

We also want some music for the road, in the form of a personal player. Again, I started by reading the reviews, searching the web etc etc. And pretty quickly came to the conclusion that want we want is something small and light, and that had reasonable music quality (let's face it, when you're sitting in Bangkok on a bus, high fidelity would be a total waste). And the winner was... the Freecom Beatman. It's amazingly small, only takes a single AA battery, and will be really easy to lose (it's so small, that you start to think that ear-bud earphones seem quite large!)

Having sooo nearly decided on the Nikon 5700, with it's amazing zoom and resolution, I started thinking and reviewing what I'm looking for a digital camera to do. What we want is something to take our photo's on this trip, that are good enough to be enlarged a bit, and that are likely to be lots of pictures of us in far away places. Last time, we took a Canon SLR with 28-300 zoom lens, and we took lots of interesting shots of people from across the street etc. The zoom lens was really helpful to get the shot we wanted, without having to disturb the scene.

But this time, it's likely to revolve around lots of photo's of the family, and when we thought about that, I realised that "small is good" - we need a camera that can just slip into a pocket whenever we go out, and which is always available...and the Nikon doesn't really do that too well. Although it's a lot smaller than a standard SLR, it's a lot bigger than all of my pockets! So I looked some more, sought some more advice, read a few reviews, and then ordered a Canon Ixus 400. It's got 4MP resolution, 3x zoom, and it's very small. So it'll take the pictures we want, and there's much more chance of it being in my pocket when I want to get a shot of something fun.

All that time, all that testing, all that going round the houses, and then doing it all again to change my choice!