Four different cameras in one week. Smaller is better.

Nothing I write here will come as news to anyone, but I thought I'd jot a few notes regardless. 

So I have a Panasonic Lumix GX1.  I've had it for about 2.5 years, and I really like it. It survived two years in the deserts of Qatar, has been dropped on a hard tile floor, and still works great.  I've got a 14mm lens, the kit lens and a 35mm Olympus prime with an adapter that cost about $20 total. 

The other day I stopped by a thrift store just as it opened and saw a Canon SX 260HS for $8.00.  I bought it, ordered a battery on Amazon and fired it up.  It worked!  There is a loose connector that turns the LCD black, so I have to push on the corner of the case to restore the picture from time to time.  It's even smaller than my GX1, so it's even easier to pick up and bring on my bicycle commute to work.  It has has a "20x" zoom, which, after 2.5 years with shorter lenses, has been enormously fun.  I took it hiking and the built-in GPS allowed me to build a little map of where we had hiked and determine the distance and locations of the photos.  Kind of fun, like a cell phone without the phone.

So right around the same time I bought a Moto G 2nd Gen phone.  I think it has an 8mb camera tied to a teeny cell sensor.  It is, however, even smaller than the Canon P/S.  I love the fact that I can put stuff right on Instagram without an intermediary step.  I had installed some underground Instagram app on my macbook and uploaded photos from the GX1, but the service eventually died and a lot of photos never made their way to a space where someone else could see them.  One thing I missed about the Canon and the GX1 was their quick shooting speeds.  The cell phone feels a little laggy.

After a week of using three cameras, and feeling drawn to the smallest camera possible (usually the cell phone), I decided to check out a Nikon D5000 from our campus library.  It came with a 200mm lens.  I hauled it home and took some test shots of my living room, but kept getting an error that there was insufficient light.  It felt really big, and sort of flimsy compared to the GX1, which is a little metal brick that could probably kill someone if wielded by a trained assassin.  The D5000 viewfinder felt a little grainy, and dark.  Liveview feels like a kludge.  I took the camera back to campus and shot some photos from my fourth floor office using that 200mm lens.  It was fun, but I had switched the lens to manual when trying to fix the earlier low light problem. I should have spent some time learning the camera, but I only had it for 24 hours.

After it is all said and done, my GX1 can do so much, and is only slightly less convenient to carry around.  If I had a long lens for my GX1, I doubt I would ever be seriously tempted by a DSLR. 

So I guess size matters a lot more than I thought it did.  I also realized that for quick little snaps of things I need to remember such as model numbers or other functional photos, my cheapo phone is perfectly fine.  But if I want to get a quick, decent quality shot of someone or something in the wild, while I'm living my everyday life, I'd be hard pressed to find something more useful than my Panasonic GX1, that I can afford.

That is all.