Kim had a really nice SLR style Kodak digital camera that died a horrible death when it met pavement accidentally (not either of our faults).  We’ve been researching new cameras together for a while now, and yesterday before we got home from the lake we stopped into Best Buy to get it.  We were spurred into action b/c we forgot to bring a camera to the lake with us to capture the high flying inner tube action (along with Heidi’s dragboat racing skills).

We picked the Canon S2 IS:

It looks like a great camera with loads of nice features (including a 12x optical zoom) but the reason we bought it is because it passed the moving hand test the best.  Kim’s biggest pet peeve with digital cameras (and Brendon’s too, apparently) is that when you look through the view finder or LCD screen and pick what you want to capture, you press the button and some time later an image is captured.  The moving hand test demonstrates this.  Take your hand and move it in an exaggerated arc slowly from one side to another, in front of your face.  Have the person testing the cameras try to capture an image as soon as your hand is in front of your face.  Most digital cameras will catch your hand way off to one side, if it’s still in the frame.  The ideal camera will catch your hand exactly in front of your face, as it was when you press the button.  Of the half dozen cameras we tried – the Canon S2 IS came closest to this ideal image.

I haven’t really played with the camera yet – I was too sore last night with my sunburn to actually do anything other than whimper.  I’ll test it out later – maybe a shot of how sun-burned my back is or something…  I know everyone wants to see something like that, right?

— Matt Ranlett

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