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I bought mine from amazon and got it just before last Thanksgiving.

At 7.6 ounces, the camera is light weight and compact, fit into a jacket/shirt pocket. It comes with a nice bright LCD display (see the image below). I like the black color, which gives me a more professional feeling. There are two major reasons behind my purchase:

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1. OIS (Optical Image Stabiliser): It works very well. OIS level 2 gives me sharp pictures when the shutter speed is as slow as 1/10 second. Compare the following two shots by yourself.
   

   OIS level 1	OIS level 2
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2. 16:9 Wide Angle: It is actually slightly wider than 28mm. Read the discussion thread. With the camera, I could record diagrams from white board, and shoot pages of documents in minutes. Here, I took a cover shot of the latest issue of American Photo magazine with slow shutter speed at 1/10 second.

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Battery life is decent, 300-shot for a fully charged battery, which is not bad, considering the fact that LCD is always on for each shot due to lack of view finder. It takes less than 2 hours for a full charge. There is also a tiny button at the right hand side of the LCD display for people to quickly adjust picture parameters, such as aperture.

As a consumer level camera, it is slow to write pictures to SD memory card, especially when RAW is enabled. It is not that useful under ambient lights when ISO 1600 is required.

I will end this blog with a picture of yellow leaves that I took last fall. I’ve made it painting-like.

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Which SLR camera system is better, Canon or Nikon? When one brings the question up at any on-line photography forum, one is triggering a war there. The war was dated back to 70’s in last century, which eventually forced Canon to ditch its old FD system for EOS system. When Nikon struggled with its old F mount system, Canon holded a significant share in film SLR market. Philip @ photo.net offered a good comparison between the two film systems.

In 1999, Nikon started the second run by announcing its breathtaking D1, followed by D1H and D1X, the next year, and D100, in 2002. For a while, Canon seemed to be lagging behind. However, this time, Canon took another detour by developing its own CMOS sensor technology. In 2001, Canon announced 1D, followed by 1Ds, the first full frame 35mm DSLR, in 2002, and Digital Rebel, the first DSLR under $1000, in 2003, along with 10D. Then, there were 20D in 2004, and 5D, the first full frame DSLR under $5000, in 2005. Would Nikon lose the battle again as in the film SLR market?

This time, underdog Nikon struke back much quicker. It announced D70, its $1000 camera, two years ago, followed by D2X, its CMOS based DSLR utilizing Wi-Fi technology, and D50, a cheaper version of D70, last year. This year, Nikon launched D200 providing less noisy pictures, while Canon only offered 30D having the same old sensor as in 20D, which disppointed a lot of users.

Well, the war continues. According to Thom Hogan, 2006 is the real year of the DSLR war. As consumers, we will all benefit from its outcome.