Saturday, Aug. 21, 2004

Buying a digital camera, posted at 9:50 a.m.

So my parents gave me $200 towards my first digital camera for my birthday. The gift was a tad excessive, but they told me that I had had a rough year and they wanted to reward me. I will not argue, especially since my dad is now pulling in two salaries, one from his pension (which is awesome for a police officer here) and one from his post-retirement job of randomly giving drug tests to drug offenders in their homes.

My dad and I scooted off to Holland yesterday to shop for it. I had done a bit of research online the day before, and knew what to look for. I was basically in the $200 price range, looking for a starter camera and that's all. I'd like to be able to take house concert pictures and maybe some other stuff and that's about it.

So we went to Staples, Sam's Club, Circuit City, lunch, and then to Office Max. We had seen this ad for a photo printer, photo paper, cartridges, and a digital camera for $199.99. We thought there must have been some sort of catch, and when we walked into Office Max, we expected to be laughed at. We weren't, even though the ad was actually for Office Depot. Diana, the salesperson, told us that that's okay, that they do price matching of competitor's ads, and they had the bundle (for $299.99) there.

In looking at it, though, I realized that the resolution of the camera was 2.1, not the minimum 3.0 I was looking for. However, Office Max also had the Kodak I liked a lot from Circuit City, a 3.2 resolution with all the other stuff that I wanted, and they were going to give me the target deal on it (which was $199.99 minus a $30 gift certificate minus $10 for every $75 I spend because I'm a teacher).

So, basically, I had this big choice to make. I could get the bundle, with a printer (which I also needed, but had not planned to buy for a while) and all the stuff needed to print out photos as well as just papers for school and a camera with mediocre resolution. Diana told me that it would really only affect things if I printed out 8.5X11" photos, and maybe a little when I printed out 5X7" photos. The research I had done beforehand confirmed this. Still, I was not sure. I called Seadragon for advice, right there from the Office Max floor, because she's one of the only friends I know with a digital camera. She recommended I go with the better camera. I liked her argument, that I didn't want to have to upgrade soon and that most of the people she knew had at least a 3.2 resolution. I still wasn't convinced, though, because I began to get excited about a new printer, which I've wanted to get since I got the new computer. (I actually don't even have a printer right now - the one at home is Bill's, and it's a hunk of crap. And he might move out sometime soon.)

I began to put my faith in Diana, the sales person. She was this amazingly attractive girl, not only because she was cute (she was, had a bit of a Katie Holmes thing going on), but because she just seemed so damn intelligent. It came to a point where I knew I was going to buy the camera from Office Max, since they do price matching and had a teacher deal, and I was going to spend the same amount of money either way. She told me that unless I was going to be printing out a lot of 8.5X11 photos, then to go with the bundle. She demonstrated, with the printer (a decent one), what the 8.5X11 looks like with both a 3.2 resolution and a 2.1 resolutition. I could tell the difference between the 8.5X11, but barely with the 5X7. And I'm not even really going to be printing out pictures very much, if at all. I still was a little hesitant, because I knew that HP basically put the camera in the bindle because it was outdated and they needed to get rid of them.

But then I did the math. The printer I got in my bindle was $135, but that did not include the ink cartridges. There are three, and they are basically $25 a pop. So, if I were to buy the same printer, it would cost me $205. So, I began to think that basically I was buying a decent printer, with the cartridges includes, and getting a not-bad-for-a-starter digital camera for free. The memory on the camera is 32MB, which was more than the other ones I was looking at, and I've been playing with it all afternoon yesterday and this morning (once the new batteries were charged) and it's pretty fun.

About Diana... it's rare that I am so sure that a girl is digging me as I was with her. She just seemed to be. I told her I was a teacher, and she was chatting me up a bit. I was trying to do the lingering eye contact without being creepy thing, and almost asked her what she was doing that night. And I might have if my dad wasn't right next to me. Or if I didn't live 600 miles away. But, then again, she might just have wanted to sell me something, which I guess is a possibility. I prefer to think that she just wanted me.

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