reesesWeb

A couple gear reviews.

Not gear reviews, but reviews on gear. The reviews themselves suck.

Camera: Canon Powershot S230 Digital Elph

I bought this camera for digital snapshots in Budapest, and later Prague. Because I was foolish and waited too long, and because I thought some tosser could get a good discount on the S400 through a particular ecommerce site he just launched (lies!), I had to buy at a brick & mortar. This wasn't actually bad, because the guy dropped the price $50 because I look good in a turban, and I was out the door.

First things first: It's still too heavy. It's lighter than the S400, but the Optio S was lighter, cooler looking, and if it didn't use xd media AND have a crappy lens, I would have bought it instead. The S230 also takes too long to focus. If you're strolling along and try to take a subtle picture of some hottie, you'd better have continuous shot mode on, or you're going to miss 2/3 of the shots.

Other than that, the lens is good, and the pictures are nice if you have time to stop and frame them. And, to its credit, it does focus and lock on much, much faster than my old A50.

Earphones: Sony MDR-NC11 noise-cancelling earphones

Bad: the computational unit is bulky, large enough to hold the 1xAAA battery that powers things. The earphones, because they fit snugly in the ear, transmit a lot of ambient resonance to your eardrum, so you hear yourself walking, sniffing, breathing, chewing, etc. And it's loud. There's also a lot of noise -- it's almost as if the "noise cancellation" is just white noise that masks the low-frequency noise instead of blocking it. The sound quality of the earphones is not as clear as it might be, especially if you're used to something like the Etymotics or even a good pair of open-air headphones. I listen to my Grados a lot (SR-80s at work and SR-125s at home), and they've accultured me to very "bright" music, so everything else sounds more subdued.

On the good side, the noise cancellation does work well on the train or on the plane. Because there's a fairly good seal between the rubber plugs and your ear canal, it also blocks a fair bit of outside noise on this basis alone. They look cool, and once you get them fitted to your ear canal, are actually amazingly comfortable, and I'm speaking as a person who can't stand most earphones for more than a few minutes.

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