Flack's Daily Smack

Yes, early adopters often end up paying for their promptness. Not only do they often pay more for the privledge, there's also the possibility that their leading edge toy will be buggy, incompatible with the mainstream versions, rendered obsolete by something else, or unsupported.

 

However, one benefit of being an easly adopter is you often end up with something of higher quality than the mass-marketted versions which have been cost-cut so much that they barely live beyond the minimal yum-cha manufacturer's waranty. And almost as evil as the marginal quality of the bargain priced versions is the creeping features of marginal or even negative value. (i.e. your 5MP camera probably won't take pictures better or even as good as your 1.3MP camera due to lens & sensor size & quality).

I'd have to agree, at least on the camera issue. Sure, 5MP is BIGGER, but if you're looking for features and quality, my old Olympus 460 is hard to beat. One nice thing about the new cameras though; my new one only takes 2 AA batteries (vs. 4) and seems to last 10x as long.

However, one benefit of being an easly adopter is you often end up with something of higher quality than the mass-marketted versions which have been cost-cut so much that they barely live beyond the minimal yum-cha manufacturer's waranty. And almost as evil as the marginal quality of the bargain priced versions is the creeping features of marginal or even negative value. (i.e. your 5MP camera probably won't take pictures better or even as good as your 1.3MP camera due to lens & sensor size & quality).

 

With digital cameras, optics are often far more limiting than imaging sensors. That having been said, one can buy cameras today which are better in practically every way than those of yesteryear, but even non-bleeding-edge ones won't be cheap.

 

My QV-770 had a nice feature I've never seen since: it could be set so that when you clicked the shutter, it would store four pictures. One within about 0.05sec of when you clicked, one about 0.05 seconds before that, a third about 0.05 seconds before that, and a fourth about 0.05 seconds before that. Too bad someone stole it. Not sure if such a thing would be possible with more dense CCDs though it might be possible to design a CCD that could do something like that if one wanted to sacrifice resolution (latch 1/2 or 1/4 of the pixels on alternating "frames" until the user clicked the shutter, then save the last two/four frames.