4/1/19. I will open my Spring Silly Camera Break with the 4/00 3mp Olympus C-3000, redolent with stupid memory and rapid-fail™ battery power circuit — a true evoker of the silly camera ethos! ... It's $10 @ ebay, but I went the premium route and wasted $26 for amazon prime quality and they came through. I then bought the lens cap at ebay for $7, so I feel I have navigated a pointless expenditure in style....

And it does take beautiful 3mp pictures, throbbing brilliant nice and on super Stupid Media supplied from my special spider-wracked antique stock! 16Mb! 21 or so pix! And the battery is always almost empty.

... It's all so beautiful. And PC Magazine says in 8/00 it was $800 retail! ... Really, I have visited the sparkingly-scammy Olympus many times in these fascinating pages, and they do bring me joy. As will its lovely lens cap whenever it shows-up....

4/7/19. An exciting harbinger of the silly spring, a perfectly functional 5/04 3mp Kodak CX7330, a happy companion to my 4/04 7300. I got it at the local Cooper City Antique Mall where I paid an opulent $25 which I was sure was wasted — but it wasn't!  ... And it came with the typical 6 or seven tiny child pix, obviously having served a short-lived purpose in ancient times and now resurrected again when the tiny child has probably got into master puppetry graduate school....

Sure, there was a little green stuff I cleaned-off from the battery contacts, and its totally-dead genuine Kodak EZ-scam rechargeable battery, which I will of course carefully preserve with the other zombies. But it leaped to life when I turned it on, took a picture, and it has a menu "Live View" setting which a previous pilgrim had set to Off so its batteries will not disappear in a few minutes! — but NO! — not a previous pilgrim but, the manual informs me, the default setting! ... Oh treasured ancient silly kodak. ... I mean it has still has its standard repertoire of scammery but, basically, harmless unless the buyer was paying attention — i.e. to figure-out the ridiculous "share" accessories etc. — which couldn't've done Kodak much good.

... But oh golly the enthralling wonderfulness when the stupid camera lights-up! — my tawdry existence is somehow justified, the world is made right, for a few hours in the morning. ... And it was only $140 in the day!

4/10/19. Lurching into luxury, at tremendous expense I've ordered a 1/05 8mp! Nikon Coolpix 8800 10x! zoom, originally $800! ... Whenever it arrives from the amazon reserves, I anticipate a treasure-trove of beauty and scammy rechargeability, and it looks like a real camera, a distinction I assume is key amongst the beautifully silly herd, at least as they called to the pitiful camera suppliant in 2005 or so....

— but wait (screeching noise)! ... It appears I will be saved from my antiquated luxury by amazon decadence, expressed in this case by their now typical inability to deliver anything promised "by 9pm". ... So sic transit gloria amazon. ... I guess I didn't want that silly old camera anyway....

4/18/19. At last, a $25 ebay genuine antique silly camera! The LCD flickers, it uses StupidMedia, I had to conserve the years and set it to 4/18/09 'cause it didn't go up to 2019 ... but my 9/97 0.786mp Olympus D500L 3x zoom works — and takes beautiful pictures, once I figured-out I had to manually enable the flash, as was to be true of most of the canons et al to come in the golden years ahead. ... Dpreview and other innocent advertising  claims it was an entire 1.0 megapixel, but it isn't....

And 1997 is hardly the earliest silly camera in the laboratory — my precious casios of yore will always outrank in that respect — well apparently my 2nd casio qv10a is contemporaneous, but anyway the glorious D500L is probably the oldest silly camera I can get pictures out-of, that is, actually usable — the qv casios stopped producing pictures through their loathsome rs232 cables some time around windows 98, hence their exclusion from the official silly camera herd....

But I'm disappointed — it was only $595 in 1998! I mean a whole megapixel or so for a lousy $600? ...  But in 1999 it was call$ == priceless....

5/30/19. A precious harbinger of spring: a perfectly preserved 1/08 10mp Fujifilm Finepix S8100 18x zoom for a bargain $20 in the frozen North — it was £225 in 2011. And $80 on amazon prime today! ... I haven't actually taken any pictures with the endearing little device, but it lit up in the junk store with joy & beauty, after I finally applied my test-it-with-batteries strategery, so long deferred....

6/8/19. It is beautiful — but not perfectly preserved: there's vignetting at the wide angle, which is perhaps what it's trying to tell me when it proclaims a "lens error" at every power-on (dismissed by operating the telephoto control). Numerous impact adjustments — whacks on a table — didn't seem to help, although they did move the vignetting around a little. ... So now I'm seized with a compulsion to buy a working model for vast sums from amazon. And it turns-out the s8100's got IS oh precious tiny camera....

11/21/19. My second S8100 is perfect & beautiful, and doesn't vignette horrible shadows in the corners. The LCD shows vertical streaks in sunlight, like my 1996 Casio, but unlike that, doesn't include 'em in the picture. (It turned-out I was supposed to flip a lever on the casio.) And the EVF probably doesn't show them, but I can't test just now since global-whatever-it-is-this-week has darkened my cold skies precipitously — nah, the EVF is the same, in a brief sunny interval. But the pictures are lovely....

And then it turned-out my S8100² came with a genuine Fuji proprietary USB cable which, sadly, requires proprietary fuji software which they sunsetted @ 8/19 — I missed the boat by a few months! It would only be of antiquarian interest — that's me! — but still, all is joyous and beautiful and I will treasure my S8100 with its precious IS and 18x zoom and useless proprietary USB cable....

And then I could download a copy of FPVInstaller.EXE from this harmless suspect, but the resulting program — surprise surprise! — didn't work.

6/9/19. At first, the 8/03 4mp PowerShot Canon A80 showed saddening signs of decrepitude — the LCD's images were strangely smeared, picture out-of-focus. But then a little impact adjustment or maybe just settling-in and it was right as rain, a beautiful point 'n' shoot with advanced photographical settings. ... Perhaps the CCD, left alone so many years, needed a short bath of electricity before it'd behave....

And it was only $20 or so in junk store America with the original box! ... $400 in the day! ... @ amazon 6/10/19 it's ~$30 prime! Apparently a popular little camera....

So that means my silly cameras include Canon "A" series A10, A20, A40, A70, A75, and now A80! ... Guess I gotta check-out the middle there — but apparently the A50 is a 1999 0.8mp camera, it's out of sequence! & it's a hideous battery-pack camera! No AAs! ... The A60 is the cruddy version of the A70, & costs too much at amazon, as does the A50, so I guess I can rest content now from my completedness frenzy....

The poor A80 is a little shy of perfection. With the flash, it's OK, but it's terribly dark without, making it one of few canons that didn't produce beautiful pictures out-of-the-box. ... Even my obviously-in-retrospect-broken A540 took beautiful pictures!

6/14/19. So then I paid $106 for an 11/08 14.7mp Canon Powershot G10 with Raw at the amazon abused camera corral, and it will arrive any week now in perfect condition. And it probably won't have broken pixels like my evil SX30 'cause this camera's got a CCD sensor! Although it is equipped with the silly recharger scam.... 

6/17/19. And then, along with the onrushing solstice, the beautiful camera came in a trice from amazon vendor "Concacaf" and is wonderful and exciting. And silly. ... The "P" programmed super advanced amateur mode produced too-bright pictures at first, but that was just because one of the adorable rangefiner-esque dials had been physically nudged, probably by the incompetent camera enthusiast, to the max exposure EV of "+2".

... Now I'll see if the battery is, in a silly camera first, a duplicate. ... And Owen Scores! ... It is the same Canon NB-7L rechargeable as the broken 2010 SX30! ... So that sad defective junk wasn't entirely a waste! ... And I did check the G10 for broken pixels. ... This fellow paid $485 for a G10 in 2008. ... Whatever he says, the sx20 w/20x superzoom is really a better deal for ~$25 more in the used camera bazaars — although no raw! ... Whatever, a lot of geezers are apparently buying these silly things, not realizing the tremendous advantages of $uper modern ≥$1k $uper-cameras. Although the ~$500 "starter" DSLRs still remain....

6/22/19. For my post-solstice journey into the days of yore, I decided to return to the arguably-sillier A540 era, at least to the 8/06 7mp Canon PowerShot A710 IS 6x zoom which, at least as delivered in top working order by amazon vendor "Vandaad", was only $36! ... Of course I did have to supply the standard CR1220 date/time battery replacement.

... Dreamy Meditations ...

I am interested in the tension between the beloved & amusing past versus the tawdry annoying present, and the A710 purchase inspires intense philosophical meditations in that area. ... So I was going to swap my current "little" A1200 road camera for the ur-silly 6mp A540 which, unlike the A1200, has "enthusiast" features, i.e. "real camera" shutter/aperture/iso settings. ... But the owenlabs road kit already includes the larger sx20 with all that stuff. ... Another A540 strange attraction is its charmingly-petite 6mp! ... So I set the A1200 to 6mp from its default 12 — Canon makes it easy-enough: the FUNC button alone brings it up on many of their gadgets. 

But the A1200 is smaller than the A540; it slips easily into the pocket, what the "bulgy" a540 and others won't. And of course the sx20 provides the "real camera" features like the extravagant 12mp resolution — how could anyone possibly need anymore?!?! — and the esoteric settings which I hardly ever use, and thus I wander serenely into the cold dreary unenticing future. ... But I may still switch to the A540. ... Somehow it feels better, pocket or no. ... And of course, I normally have a phone in my pocket while wandering about in the barren landscapes of days to come. 

Failing Dreams?

But really I have failed in my rigorous silly analysis — the camera-in-the-pocket is a characteristic of estate walking-around, at my beautiful palatial home in ridiculously-hot (thank goodness!) Florida. When I'm on the road, I'm forced to keep a phone around me, for google maps if nothing else, but it's a practice I normally abhor — I never liked phones even before cells. So the road cameras, which I use for important activities like taking pictures of the fronts of junk stores, can well include the A540, if I want — because I am free! ... I can carry any silly device around I feel like, so long as it fits in the back seat of the car. ... And what's the point of having all these silly cameras if I don't assign arbitrary whimsical destinies? ... So I bought a  third A540 for $22 from the admirable ebay hi_tek_trading, 'cause the second A540 was a little battered — viewfinder's got floaters — and now at last my silly camera herd has reached perfection for a few pointless minutes. With, to be sure, the addition of a cr1220 battery for my third and perfected a540....

And indeed I could instead even deploy the A710 with its svelte image stabilization; or even the upcoming A590! ... Or the even svelter A720!

6/28/19. Inspired by my A710 adventures and the hitek site, I moved on to the 1/08 8mp Canon PowerShot A590 IS what was a mere $24 and should show-up any day now....

7/4/19. And it is a thing of joy & beauty! ... It's so cute; tiny little pretend camera with its somehow-imitation-real-camera bulging battery compartment. ... But only two AAs! And Image Stabilized! ... It's like a perfected version of my broken 2006 A540, which of course is what it is, and so shall I use it on my wandering journeys in light & shadow. ... It is the glorious completion of the a540's sad trail of brokenness & despair....

7/19/19. Another hitek adventure, a $15(!) 6/02 4mp Olympus C-4000 and worth every penny! ... Ok really it's kind-of appalling — slow, dark pix, stupid media — but it does take pictures! And they're not so horrible. And it was probably $400 in the day!

... Oh poor silly shirker! The pictures are lovely! ... Beautiful colorful, even the dark ones, even on their stupid media — perhaps especially, so I and the pitiful few other stragglers out there still using the stuff can form a cult, claiming stupid media is special, and takes better pictures — I mean, the chemical film guys do that, so why not!?!?! ... Especially fraudulent pixels, of ravishing beauty....

7/25/19. I just noticed I dated the last few items in 2018, doubtless seeking the past in my own special way, but here I've found it in a different place: a 1952(?) ∞mp Spartus Slide projector, for which I paid too much at Florida BKG antiques dealer Deco Dave. ... But it lights up! And I actually have slides from my beloved formative period, although of course nobody looks at 'em with a projector anymore, preferring digital scanning and the LCD screen. ... But the Spartus'll just wait around for that golden day when I will view 'em at last the real way — I actually still have the sparkly screen one is supposed to point the projector at. 

Of course I got a slide projector or two accumulated over the years, but none of 'em as cute as the Spartus. And I never got one of those monstrous relative-torturing machines so beloved of the aged in my youth and a constant source of consternation to them and amused relief to the snarling youth when the stupid things'd jam. ... @ 7/18, amazon's got a ~$520 "Kodak Carousel 4200 Slide Projector" which oddly does not include the projection lens! (?) ... They got plenty of slide viewers and of course digital scanners, but apparently the slide projector was so annoying it finally fell beneath the waves....

7/29/19. So I went to the beloved hitek and got a somewhat battered 2/12 16! mp Canon PowerShot A1300 5x zoom for just $41! And CCD instead of that crummy CMOS. Doubtless the vast 16 megapixels, the largest in the extensive Owenlabs silly camera collection, will evoke ravishing vistas of beauty. ... I await the advent with the proverbial bated breath....

And then I realized the A1300 is the successor to my beloved 2011 A1200, what I had concluded was the furthest year of my pretensions. ... 8/2/19. And so be it! The a1300 is a silly camera too far. It has no mode wheel, lotsa pixels, but shaky without special measures — I assume sunlight / tripod. ... But the camera itself looks better than the hitek picture — the fellow was striving to show the dirt marks....

So, along with the 2010 SX30, my 2012 a1300 shows the tragic denouement of the 2008 iphone smashing its way thru pitiful silly cameradom without excuse or petition — resulting in my silly cameras of sorrow. 

... I mean the manual is one of those generic jobs covering 37 cameras — printing the things was too expensive....

The Super Powers of the Auto Button

But Lo! Despite the missing mode wheel, Canon provided me with AUTO as one of the 37 functions of the arrow/function/who-knows-what control. And indeed pressing this precious button switches between the AUTO mode with automatic exposure and flash and the glorious "P" mode — well, unless it trashes something as per the AUTO co-icon, under some conditions I'll probably find-out when I least expect it. ... But anyway, in "P" mode I can suppress the flash and set my -1⅓ f-stop darkness! So all is forgiven! My 16mp chiaroscuro will live again!

... Of course I couldn't read about it in the multiple-camera manual; but I guessed it by staring. ... But with the AUTO resurrection in hand, I went and checked for stupid pixels, and there weren't any, and so the A1300 is now the official Hi-Rez champ at the laboratory. ... And be sure to check the new improved A1400 — with fewer features!

8/21/19. The next gratifying hitek magical gadget was the 1/08 8mp Canon PowerShot A720 IS 6x zoom, an enchanting camera for a mere $30, albeit a slightly snootier duplicate of the a710. Both cameras, I was suprised to discover, have a "wide" mode that, in the 720's case, takes a 6mp picture with a cinemascopey aspect ratio, probably mostly featureitis for the no-doubt exquisitely-aesthetic video....

Like the a590 and a710, it is an a540 owenlabs traveling camera replacement candidate, establishing a plethora of choice in my little antique kingdom. It's so gratifying — and cute! ... And it takes nice pictures — all the silly cameras with a few minor exceptions take nice pictures; even the broken ones! 

But as my silly camera journey wanders on, I must admit some of the cameras, particularly the "image stabilization" flavor like the beautiful A720, take more nice pictures — they're more likely, particularly with my beloved chiaroscuro tendencies, to take an in-focus pic. Except for the scam-o-rama segment of the beloved silly camera market, like the next offering, where the film is artificially rationed, digital camera pictures are essentially free, so it's not as important how likely they are to be in focus as in the age of chemical film — one can always take another picture.

... Of course once I got the magic image stabilization, I had to figure-out how to turn the flash off — so I could take au naturel pix in available light without the tawdry tabloid flashing electronics....

8/22/19. And now for a little comedic relief, we turn to the 10/04 6mp Fujifilm FinePix E550 4x zoom, $10 at Find-It! Thrift (supporting suicide prevention somewhere around Ft. Lauderdale). The beautiful E550 uses the xD-flavor scam film, but the laboratories've got some and it takes nice pictures, at least with flash. ... And it was only $10! 

It's got a resetting "display" control, which means the LCD'll probably be mostly on and the camera'll be limited to the usual few minutes of picture-taking. ... But it was $500 back when ... or maybe $400. ... Today's xD film cost more than the $10 camera — although the film was doubtless exquisitely pricy in the glorious rip-off days of yore, it was still probably less than the camera....

9/10/19. The first conundrum the crack owenlabs technical staff had to deal with on this 4/06 6mp Kodak Z650 10x zoom was the falling-off lens cap which, as shown , I fixed with an incredibly ingenious bit of tooth-pickery. ... Actually I could've just glued the unsprung part, but that would've taken time, and I kind of like the toothpicks embodying the true silliness.

... And this is the one I might've bought instead of my broken Canon A540 — although maybe not; dpreview claims a "street price" of $310! — the extra $hundred's for the separate SD door I suppose — with the A540 I gotta use the battery door — and the 10x zoom of course. ... But the beautiful device was a mere $24 at the glorious hitek site, land o' junk 'n' beauty. And it takes lovely pictures as usual, although I haven't quite figured-out the Real Photographer© "PASM" mode yet — ah, piece o 'cake! ... So I set-up my -1.3EV for the "P" mode, just like my other precious silly cameras, for the beloved owenlabs© chiaroscuro©® effect. Although I still have to push down the flash even when I turn it on in "P" mode — or it'll flash-out my oscuro....

10/18/19. Sadly, the next $25 hitek delight 8/05 5mp Kodak Z740 5x zoom appeared faulty: it seemed sick in the batteries, as I attempted to coax it back into joy and duty and failed. ... But I did get one beautiful picture out of it, first. I'm sure I could return it to the hitek guy for a refund, but it seemed churlish. ... And then ....

Lo! The light of light! The dawn came — the foolish curator had hopelessly sewn confusion by tragically deleting individual files (old laboratory backups) I found left-over on the 2Gb SD when I examined it @ the PC — oh Folly! O Remorse! ... Even worse, forensics suggest it might've been formatted to the evil nouveau FAT32, anathema to an innocent 2005 Kodak....

Reformatting to good ol' FAT16, taking another picture and, indeed, even copying the first picture back to the SD — and all seemed copacetic! And it remembered its EVF setting from before the deletion debacle and numerous power cycles! ... So it is a perfectly-formatted beautiful pitiful 5mp Kodak, oh Joy & Beauty & serene real photo-fan perfection.... $379 list? But Dpreview says it was $349 street price.

The Moral of the Story

of course is when a silly camera — of even today's $lendiferous $uper cameras — won't go, try removing the SD card first. With the PCs they always told us to disconnect all the peripherals to troubleshoot, which works great for laptops but was ludicrous with my enveloped-in-snaky-cables desktops. But the camera film should be simple....

10/25/19. Out on the wild junk road I overpaid $40 for the beauteous & scammy 5/05 4mp Sony DSC-S90 crummy 3x zoom. A colorful sticker claims it's got "stamina" aka long battery life, and perhaps that has something to do with the mildly-but-not-entirely-broken battery door, but one thing it's definitely got is a built-in memory which had been filled with relatives-@-holiday and baby pictures — before, I'm guessing, they figured-out the extortionate sum Sony was demanding for a cable to release the built-in pictures. ... I have a Sony scam cable, but of course not this scam cable — each one like a $now-flake, so unique & $cammy & co$tly....

And of course the s90 requires the Sony proprietary Memory-Stick-it-to-you Pro film of which, oddly, I seem to have an adequate supply. Although I must admit I never noticed that the "duo" flavor of this junk refers to a tiny switch on the plastic card with which one is supposed to access the other half of your ridiculously expensive memory. ... And I had to go through a couple of card readers before I got one that'd go. 

So I'd guess the pitiful pilgrims paid something around $290 in the day, took the holiday/baby pictures, were sprung the cable scam, along with the film $cam, and threw the thing in a drawer awaiting the return of the king or perhaps the itinerant silly camera collector. ... And three of the three pix I took are jiggly. ... So I took two more, both jiggly; but actually one of the existing pix by some mischance wasn't jiggly. ... Ah well, the original purchasers, and me, will never know how jiggly their pictures were....

11/10/18. Also a junk road purchase, but a $7.50 bargain, the wondrous 3/00! 1.3mp Sony MVC FD85 Diskette Camera will keep miserable company with the FD71, FD75 & FD7! ... I snootily informed the snoopers lady it was a digital film camera 'cause it had some typical scammy Sony fraudulent claim on the front "Memory Stick compatible", not noticing the "with an optional Floppy Disk Adapter" but she set me right and I shall see if it is even still floppy disc compatible, which the others are of course. Oddly, the batteries for these floppy disc cameras are compatible, so I cancelled my stupid F330 amazon charger order in time, because I already have more than one charger for it, thus economizing to the tune of $20! 

So the scammy "Memory Stick/Floppy Disc Adaptor" MSAC-FD2M is $50 new @ amazon, which is really a scam too far for me. ... So I bought a $23 used one with memory stuck @ ebay which I'm sure'll work gloriously. ... And it did! Oh what wondrous things in this brave new world! ... After, of course, I replaced its two totally-dead 2016 coin batteries. And winders did suggest a scan, which apparently had occurred before, judging by the file debris. But now I will leave the silly thing in the FD85 as it marches on into the bright gleaming future, with a glorious 128 megabytes of mavica pictures, bogus zoom & all! ... Be still my Sony scammed heart! ... Altho I suspect the silly floppy adapter'd work with the other mavicas in my pitiful herd. Of course, this converts a famously-campatible camera — the floppy disc was once as compatible as you could get — to a device dependent on a digital film notoriously-scammy, unreliable, and even today, rarer than floppies, the Sony scam memory-of-the-week. ... So it's a win-win. ... But of course it'll store vast quantities of 1.3mp pix. ... And lookee here: I can get Windows XP or 2000 USB drivers, so I could see the stupid floppy-stuck in my diskette drive! ... 'Though not in my also-USB floppy drive, so sad....

As noted elsewhere on this thrilling site, the Mavica was a huge hit, largely because of the floppy "film", and was a standard appurtenance at any real estate office in those ancient days....

11/11/18. Who says there's no excitement on the wild camera junk trail!?!? I was this close to distributing the batteries/SD card in a 2/03 3.1mp Kodak EasyScam DX6340 4x zoom 'cause it would only take mostly-obscured pix what looked like a large built-in thumb shadow, when I gave it a last hopeless impact adjustment — just a love tap — well, actually more than one — and whammo! It took beautiful pictures, and might well do so again! ... Ahhh the rewards of the silly camera cult...

I had been observing the try-it-out-with-batteries discipline on the junk road, so it did light-up. And it would be too tedious, surely, to bring along a complete selection of silly film. And I wouldn't get the thrill of the chase, when I whack the thing and it works! ... Excitingly, it defaults to date-stamping the pictures, even the magic-thumb-obscured initial efforts. And it seemed to fire-off a zero-length jpeg when I removed the SD card. ... But nobody's perfect!

And it advertises it's got an "indoor/outdoor" LCD display! ... The original sticker, which obscures the right-side of the LCD, suggests my impact adjustment may have been a decade or so late. ... And $248.99 @ 3/04.....

11/15/18. Dpreview says the 1/08 10mp Fujifilm S1000fd 12x zoom was $358.98 @ amazon, presumably in 2008 — well no actually that's today + $4.99 shipping, brand new. But this site has a more sensible $180 in the day. ... But I got it caressingly used for a mere $34 at my beloved hitek, and it's cute as a button! ... Sadly there's no IS — that's limited to the bigger better s8100 — so it's got fuzzy tendencies, presumably ameliorated with the built-in flash....

But it's Cute!

Truth to tell, my beloved sx20 is almost as tiny/cute, but still every time I encounter another one of the tiny herd, I am stricken anew with their pitiful tininess, so ingenuously trying to unfrighten the poor camera fan, presumably traumatized by the giant DSLRs and their ilk.

It was so cute, I went and bought a working S8100!

12/9/19. I bargained the garage sale lady down from $10 to five for a 2/04 4mp Olympus Stylus 410 Digital. With box and CD and cables and stuff! And using the exalted proprietary xD film. The box had an xD card which the lady retrieved, probably realizing some time ago that it wasn't available at walmart, hence my vastly successful bargaining.

But of course I have xD cards — a precious few, to be sure, and my 2gB size probably won't work, which is why the cards were not terribly expensive, but I shall see. ... And I did, and it worked good.

While I was mercilessly bargaining the lady down, she assured me the thing worked, and I said I had numerous broken cameras — my beloved chimed-in in fervid witness. ... I mean, the majority of my silly cameras work, but still, there is a surging population of dead boxes. ... And this beautiful toy is one of them — until the $13 power supply I bought from amazon cures it.

12/11/19. And the $13 charger seems to do the trick — with some urging: I had to stick a cardboard shim under the battery, or under the hold-down plastic clamps, to make contact with the charging fingers. But the light turned green after only a few hours, and someday I'll try the seemingly-dead battery. Right now, I told it to format my 2gb xD card, and it is, sector by sector, slowly. ... My next challenge: find out how to set the date, which it complains-about at every startup. ... Which was EZ....

Then I tried recharging the the original battery — which charged up good! And I can't be sure I didn't commit some misstep in my original charging attempts and so perhaps my $13 for the shim-requiring charger + 2 spare batteries was wasted,  and the original seller was completely blameless!

And it does take beautiful pictures....

12/17/19. $27 got me a beautiful 1/07 7mp Canon SD800 IS from the ever-blameless hitek — well, blameless, so long as the included charger/battery works, which I blithely assume it will, even 'though the heavens shall otherwise fall. I mean, it came charged, but the recharger was wrapped in seamless plastic, so naturally I fear the fell beast of entropy and mortality. ... But my boundless faith is rewarded and after the seemingly-inevitable four hours, the little LED turned green and all is well....

The laboratory doesn't normally patronize this style of camera, with its proprietary rechargeable battery — instead of decent also-rechargeable but available-in-drugstores AAs — but the price was right and it opens-out the silly camera collection to countenance even Canon's sins. And there were idiots who actually preferred rechargeable.

And the camera has some kind of magic feature within it that retains the date/time even when I removed the battery for its 4-hour charge.....

1/7/20. A new year! Another camera! ... A beautiful 8/08 Canon A1000 10mp IS hitek gadget, a mere $25 for so much exciting cute camera. Which is pretty-much the amazon price, but hitek's more reliable. ... Speaking of which, the supplied 4Gb SD doesn't work in two USB SD adapters — but does work in at least two computer SD slots! The computers say it's FAT32, so I assume it's some mysterious physical difference — it's a  uSD adapter thing ... the SD fingers looked a little fat....

But of course it takes beautiful pictures. And it is not one of those pretend-tiny-cameras; it doesn't look like a miniaturized DSLR. It looks like it'll fit in your pocket — a little better than the also-pocketable a1200 & a1300....

Valentine's Day 2020! An astonishing Kodak 1996! DC25 0.2mp! Antedates dpreview.com! And a mere $14 at Cooper City Antiques! With CR123A batteries, what the ministering angels @ Cooper City equipped it with! ... Oh my goodness this is so exciting — this could be the oldest silly camera I got. ... Well actually my beloved casios are the same vintage, but they only communicate via rs232, which is also the only way to get the internal pix out of the DC25, but the DC25 also comes triumphantly equipped with a CF slot! ... The rs232 route won't be happening anytime soon @ owenlabs. ... & it was ~$500 in the day!

... Well took a picture, and there's a "DC0001H.K25" what appears in a directory, but my pitiful owenshow can't copy it. Probably 'cause the date's super gershtunk. But it is a beautiful picture nonetheless! ... Well a picture anyway. I suspect there's some fooling-around with the dimensions in the usual fraudulent behavior of the time. The "k25" apparently means ".TIF" and indeed everyone's happier when it's renamed like that....

But it lives, it breathes, and I even have CR123A rechargeable NiMH batteries, what I got for my pitiful IS3DLX 35 mm film camera, and which were apparently a preferred pro-photo battery at the time — meaning, most probably, fraudulent pitiful foto-fan battery....

2/28/20. Another hitek bargain, a 1/11 14mp FujiFilm S2950 for a measly $40! Dpreview still linked to the $275 amazon price, so disdainful are they of the fujifilm effort, but it takes very nice pictures nevertheless, colorful and well-focused. ... To be sure, like almost all the silly cameras of course, but these are a luxurious 14mp! ... I revel in their sybaritic beauty....

It came with another hitek µSD-SD-adapter special (like the A1000), which works in the camera but not in any of my SD usb readers. I did try filing the adapter plastic, which looks a little "high", in brutal vandalism, and then it was readable in a single reader, but still not the others in the herd. ... But really it's not a significant drawback; he who has not abundant SD cards should not hunt the wily silly camera. And I just realized at least one of my readers has a specifically µSD slot which didn't seem to work either after brief experimentation.

Calculating

Oh the dawdling days of global-whatever-it-is! It took me all the way to 3/8/20 to notice the lovely S2950's got auto focus! ... I mean, of course it does! — they all do! ... Forgive me, tiny valorous antique obsolete camera! I have slighted you, just because it's cold & gloomy & we're all gonna die from a super-gloomy Republican virus! ... I'm too young to be bored! 

... Well, that's better. ... But perhaps the silly cameras have run their race? ... Before I came to paradise, I amassed a silly calculator collection, still lurking in the garage, traces of which appear in these astounding pages, but their glory days are all in the past, and the herds were gathered from comparable inspirations — the cuteness, the cheapness when they got a few years old — but then the calculators just got so cheap people, except for the geekiest, had no idea which calculator they had, and then the phones crushed them also. ... Today the beautiful calculators are ~$12 @ walmart; the cameras — without a viewfinder to their names — still lurk @ ~$25-$35. ... But there is no comparable $uper-Expen$ive Calculator market, like the ridiculou$ contemporary D$LR$. ... Although some kind of smelly Texas Instruments/SAT collusion still lets TI charge extra.

3/14/20. But then a random ebay email got me this lovely $16! 1/02 3.2mp FujiFilm S3800 6x zoom! Which takes beautiful pictures of course; although they're kind-of greeny-ugly in the svelte luxury-laden EVF — the 3800 was $449 in the imaginary retail of the day! — but the pix are OK when viewed on my PC. And it takes 'em on its inspirationally proprietary xD film. ... An all-but perfect purchase! ... Cheap, antique, and sweet!

... So, e'en as our civilization creaks to a halt in the covid19 super catastrophe plague — apparently even worse than the doom-laden certain-death climate-whatever-it-is-this-week — I will at least retain the amusing entertainment of my beloved silly cameras, as we walk into the darkness ... holding our heads up high no doubt. ... And they're so cute! ... The silly cameras, that is, not the heads ... at least not all the heads.

A Second Coming

It was so sweet, around 5/4/22 I accidentally bought another, in the thrilling storm of a FujiFilm viewfinder epiphany. This one came with a free XD card which included a few dubious test shots, always a treat for us pitiful silly camera afficianados. ... It also came with various accessories, although not the original box, but including a valuable antique software CD/DVD which probably won't install anywhere in my computer herd....

4/29/20. Another covid19 beautiful camera, the expensive (~$95!) 4/08 11mp FujiFilm S100fs 14x zoom. 

Tragically however, the kindly hitek guy didn't include the charger, although the listing faithfully promised one, demonstrating, no doubt, the horror of today's covid19 plague in all its appalling horror. ... Amazon's got 'em for ~$14 — but for May 1, no doubt a covid19-driven delay. And the hitek guy's obviously got one, 'cause he charged the thing up so I can revel in its real cameraness ... but only for a little while. 

But dpreview says the street price was $750! ... And the zoom control appears to be on the lens — i.e., one rotates it around, like a real camera! Indeed, the case is littered with real camera buttons and controls. Actually far more than my real camera. ... And it takes lovely pictures, and eventually, since the hitek guy couldn't be bothered, I bought a $30 gadget at amazon w/extra batteries what, amazingly, took only until May 1 to deliver....

Sat 11/6/21 10:35 am: I have neglected this lovely thing, one of whose shining attributes is, apparently, long charge life! I vaguely noticed that I kept picking it up and, as opposed to most of such random choices, it turned-on!  ... And the rotating zoom lens thing really feels wonderful after all this button-pushing. So today I got it a 67mm lens cap, so I can leave it lying on its back without fear of dust on the lens. ... Of course it's giant, which is one of its charms no doubt, but restricts it to estate-tralling. ... And the sun just came out!

Hitek?

Once the ebay site glistened in the dawning day of silly cameras — well, a year or so ago — but a week later I hadn't received the missing battery charger he was going to send me "ASAP" @ 4/10/20 for the beautiful s100fs . ... Perhaps it's actually on a covid plague slow-boat? ... But sadly, I wait ... & wait ... slipping into MCI despair as the weary beautiful really hot days pass silently by, in paradise....

Reprievement!?

Tue 4/21/20 9:12 am. And then yesterday a package showed-up containing the missing charger, one of those USB jobbies so I had to supply my own USB cube but it is enough and now I can return to the https://www.ebay.com/str/hitektrading/Digital-Cameras/ site in joyous surrender for more bargains. ... Of course he still distributes his cameras with doesn't-work-SD-reader µSD/SD converter — but most cameras come without any film....

But I fear the golden days of Hitek are still over; perhaps he can't get around 'midst the covid, and will return to frequently-updated glory @ some future time....

8/20: Still seems fairly moribund; a recent purchase, which I found by searching ebay for "canon powershot", not at the hitek site, but also undelivered by a few days now. ... Although the "everything" site https://www.ebay.com/str/hitektrading is a little more amusing with gadgets other than cameras. ... But then his wandering camera showed-up, with the charger and the battery — which worked!

2/10/21: Entirely empty today; the golden age is past....

5/19/10. As the hideous toll of covid19 rises across the northern murican people's republics, seemingly selecting the socialist & stupid for its victims, I obtained an ancient beautiful 1/00 3mp Canon Powershot s20 2x zoom from the very dawn of silly cames. ... But it did not come easy. ... I must conclude with overwhelming compassion some of the amazon merchants are innocenté, and when they specify "with charger" they're not actually suggesting the charger or the battery work! ... How can they tell? They're not rocket science camera technicians. ... But no matter. I will wallow in the ancient-of-days gadget, which does indeed take lovely pictures, including an entire CF of the family & friends in the year 2000. 

And it came with the box and everything in it, numerous CDs, and an obvious 3rd-party case suggesting the usual sad tale of the elderly fellow who's passed into the beyond, his precious camera excavated for amazon. ... I got a pitiful scrawled note asserting the the author didn't make a profit as, I assume, a sort of apology for what the seller presumably guessed might be inadequacies. 

... So the battery didn't charge, but then I used the exciting included cable which is supposed to run the camera directly from the charger gadget — and it didnt work! ... But I refrained from rending my garments, instead getting some super-fluid Deoxit and sploshing the little battery-like metal tabs, pushing it in and out a few times and — voila! Works like a charm! And now I have high hopes for the battery (disappointed), but I bought some more which'll show-up any month now, in amazon/covid time. ... I also went back in the past and got an s10! ... which uses the same battery/charger....

The "Street price" was $900! The PC Magazine review says $800.... And be sure to check-out contemporaneous cameras A10, A20. which were apparently the cheap seats (?!) — oh I see; they were different streams of model updating. The 1.3mp A10 debuted in 2/01, while the beautiful 2.1mp s10 was @ 11/99, a year and a mp ahead....

Batteries

Another S/A divide is that the A10/A20 take common decent AA cells, instead of the costly proprietary rechargables. ... Indeed my beautiful A20 came to grief via battery rot — seemingly invalidating my obscure theories — and it's true enough, I've never had a proprietary rechargable battery rot on me, which is a plus. But the "S" cameras provided luxurious mp sizes unavailable until later models with AA batteries — that is, the "S" purchaser paid a premium for the extra mps, in the form of the stupid charger. ... And in our glorious covid19 era, rechargable AA nimh are readily available, and are obviously preferable to the proletarian AAs, since I've never had an nimh AA rot on me, like my poor A20 — which, to be sure, might have had nimh AAs in it, but I'll never know since the frozen battery compartment evades inspection. ... But if it did, it would be the first....

The proprietary cameras supposedly were smaller. And indeed, the proprietary-battery S20 is slightly thinner than the decent-AAs A20. But only slightly. ... And the S20's a megapixel ahead of the A20 anyway, so I suppose it's no comparison....

But then the A/S series contrast figures in favor of the A series anyway; even 'though I replaced my battery-frozen A20, I didn't have to beat the bushes to find the batteries, since they're everyday common decent AAs....

5/27/20. At last my exquisitely silly 8/99 2mp Canon PowerShot S10 2x zoom  appeared. ... Actually it arrived days ago, but just like the S20, its NiMH battery was dead, and I delayed, waiting for replacement batteries in covid time. ... But they came at last, two of 'em for $30 (expensive!), and the lovely cameras lit-up and took beautiful pictures. ... And the s10's "street price" was only $700!

5/29/20. Returning to more recent silliness, there's the 3/05 5mp Konica Minolta DiMage Z5 broken zoom, purchased from ebay scamsters "california545", who thoughtfully prepped the unit to enable digital zoom so the pitiful silly camera aficionado would be fooled, at least for a while. But to "make up" for it, the scammy seller included batteries — which this time, remembering my harrowing A20 experience, I removed immediately, installing good ol' NiMHs — and a tiny SD card, which did indeed take nice pictures.

... And I suppose the silly camera aficionado should embrace & celebrate the shoddiness, in commemoration of the decades of scammy camera sales. ... And so I shall, innocently cavorting ... just as soon as I get around to it....