New Camera!

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago when I blogged about passing my course and so finishing my degree that this meant I was entitled to a little reward for the last five years of study. Well, I got it. Mr Click treated me to the camera that I wanted.

This reward was not without a slight hiccough. I started looking at cameras somewhere around the beginning of April, mainly because I was starting to flag a little. I was struggling with an assignment and needed something to help me see that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Originally the plan had been for me to get a new laptop when I completed my degree but I’d been shying away from that for a couple of reasons; one, my current laptop is doing okay for what I use it for and I’ve got my Kindle and phone for other similar things as well, two, I’m looking to go on to study further in the future and it seems more logical to wait to upgrade my laptop until I’m ready to do that so I’m working with something which will last me, rather than something which might need replacing a lot sooner otherwise.

And my little compact camera was starting to show its age. It’s not that it’s not working, but sometimes it does funny things. When I took it down to Manchester when I was involved with Sport Relief it started doing this thing where it would put the lens part way out then flash up LENS ERROR in ominous letters on the screen and not cooperate until you’d turned it off and back on again.

It’s also been doing this thing for a while (which my old Canon compact did too) where it would say CHANGE BATTERY or words to that effect and you’d have to pop the battery out and back in to get it to work. And, owing to my lack of a case for it, it’s got a little dark mark on the screen which sometimes makes it look like people have a big bruise on their face when you look at pictures. Obviously it doesn’t copy across onto the actual picture, but it can be worrying when you’re looking at photos.

In short, it’s old and I’ve been lusting after other cameras for a while. My colleagues cottoned on to this and for my birthday gave me an Amazon voucher that I could use towards my new camera, so I’ve been sitting on it ever since the end of April. Of course I did a bit of searching and I kept finding myself drawn to the Samsung Smart Cameras. They’re like a camera with some of the features of your mobile phone, like being able to email or upload photos to Facebook direct from your camera via a wifi connection.

And I knew that was what I wanted.

The top, top of the range cameras were way out of my budget, but the more I searched, the more the price seemed to drop on the models I was actually watching. I started out looking at the WB250F and then found the WB800F which had everything I wanted and more. So that was the target I’ve been working towards for the last few months.

And then, horror of horrors, it went out of stock. This particular camera comes in white, red and a black/blue colour. As my shiny silver Canon got scuffed up pretty quickly I knew that white was not going to be the colour for me. The red was nice, but the blue colour looked really smart. That was what I wanted. And that was what went out of stock first.

As the time for my results coming out got closer I started frantically checking to see whether my camera was coming back into stock. The red reappeared briefly and then went out of stock again while the white maintained its stock levels annoyingly well. I began to steel myself for the possibility that I might not get what I want and even tried to look (unsuccessfully) at alternative cameras. The problem was, I wanted the WB800F and since that was what I fell in love with, nothing else was going to compare to that.

I like to think that sometimes things are just meant to be. And my new camera was clearly meant to be. The day after my results came out and I confirmed my 2.1 three brand new cobalt blue WB300Fs went up for sale on Amazon. I was not with Mr Click at the time and to my horror, as I refreshed the page, that number in stock went down to one! What I didn’t realise was that one of those cameras had been purchased by my loving husband. It was pretty lucky that I made contact with him before I went ahead and ordered the last one myself.

I went ahead and used my birthday voucher to get supplies for the shiny new camera. I got a snazzy little purple case for it (so my blue-ish camera will be in a purple case, like my blue phone in its purple case), a 16Gb camera card, and a pack of screen protectors (to hopefully prevent what happened to my Canon happening to my Samsung). And all that stuff for about £12 thanks to my voucher.
I’m still getting the hang of the different settings on the camera. I like the auto settings for various things like vivid colours and panorama. I’m not sure whether I would ever use some of the settings, but it’s nice to know that I’ve got them there to play with.

And my absolute favourite setting is probably panorama. I live in a beautiful place and the one problem I often have when I take photos is squeezing in all the scenery that I want to include. And now I can.
So you can expect to see an awful lot more photos like this in the future:

Click to see full size.