This Week's Ebay Bargain

...was a Fuji Finepix S5700, Fuji's top of the range bridge camera of a few years ago, for £23 plus P&P. It's a 7 megapixel camera with a x10 optical zoom, the "bridge" part is that it is supposed to be a bridge between ordinary digital cameras and digital SLRs, with an eye-level digital viewfinder that acts like an SLR's viewfinder as well as the usual rear LCD screen. I've been using a much earlier version of this (the Z2800, with 2 megapixels and x6 zoom) as my "carry everywhere" camera for a couple of years now, but it's getting a bit unreliable so I decided it was time for a change.

I've been playing with the S5700 for a couple of days now and the results are pretty good at the lower zoom ratios - the higher end there's a little purple fringing around areas of high contrast, but you need to look closely to see it. At full 7mp resolution it can take over 1000 pictures on a 2gb SD card! Even so, I'll probably set it to 4 megapixels for routine use, since most pictures will probably end up reduced in size for web pages etc.

Here's a couple of pictures I took today, the usual canal-side ducks, this time in Regents Park. WARNING - VERY large!

( Ducky... )

Tried to get some photos of coots too, but they were too busy beating up the ducks to cooperate; they really are aggressive little buggers compared to ducks, just wouldn't stay still.