manningtree

Patience.

What happened: the camera, a nice pocket-able Canon SD1000 was snuggled nicely in a bag. Also in the bag was a nalgene bottle, almost full of the clear liquid known as water. Unbeknown, the lid was not tightly secured, the bottle was upside down, and a litre or so of water filled the bag and drowned the poor little camera.

Kaput.

In the past I’d successfully restored various electronics from immersion with a combination of gentle heat, sunlight and some patience. Stripping the device down as much as possible also helps, as it did with Paul’s phone after it had come off badly in an argument with a bowl of washing up…

So I opened up the camera, removed the SD card and battery, and carefully propped it next to a heating vent to dry.

A day went by, and there was no life to be seen.

A week came and went and the screen began to flickr. Occasionally.

A month later, and the lens started to move. Sometimes.

After another two months I gave up, ordered a replacement SD with more megapixels and Image Stabilization (but not better image quality it turned out), and dropped the SD1000 into a drawer, and tried to forget about it.

Fast forward a couple of months and a hurried exit for an overnight winter hike. In the rush to get up and out I grabbed the wrong camera, only noticing my mistake some hours later when we were already up in the mountains. My heart sank, a little.

Then something unexpected: the camera worked, with focus and exposure improving rapidly with successive pictures:

As ever there’s a lesson to this, I’m just not sure which one:

1. Drying electronics out takes a long time and lots of patience.
2. Drying electronics out is helped significantly by a reduction in temperature, in this case going from +15 to –10 Celsius in the space of about 6hrs.
3. You can break a camera out of a sulk and persuade it to work properly again by making it feel jilted.

A long time ago, on the search for a perfect compact, I mused as to whether the Sigma DP1 was the answer. It wasn’t. A year plus later and the perfect camera still isn’t here, but why?

There have certainly been some excellent candidates. The advent of Micro Four Thirds with the Pen E-P1 (and P2) from Olympus, and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1;  together with cameras like the Samsung NX10 and Ricoh GXR which also boast larger sensors with a corresponding lower pixel density and offer support for interchangeable lenses, have made 2009 a very interesting year for those waiting for a pocket-able cameras without wanting to compromise on image quality.

Looking back at the criteria I had – pocket sized, great photographers control, superb image quality, cheap reasonably priced – I can see that a couple of the examples above fit the bill, so why aren’t any of this current crop sitting comfortably alongside the keyboard as I type this? Two reasons: first I wasn’t complete in defining my requirements: I’d now add fast accurate auto-focus, accurate exposure metering and be more precise about defining image quality (great resolution, good dynamic range, low noise at higher ~800 ISO). Second is feature creep. With these cameras now offering HD video capture, something that was never previously a requirement for me, I find myself marking them down for things like poor audio support.

I guess there’s two lessons here:

1. We really do judge things relatively – my requirements have increased because what’s on offer has got better.
2. If you wait, something better comes along.

So I’m still happy with the little Canon, because having a half-decent camera in your pocket is better than having no camera (or “the best camera is the camera you you actually use”). Here’s a recent pic to prove it:

I’d also note that the Sigma which was ~$800 is now around $530 which brings me to:

3.  If you wait, consumer electronics, including cameras, get cheaper