Comparison shopping

...sure eats up a lot of time.

So I'm in the market for a new camera, and I'm finding that I can spend 3 hours on Amazon and not even realize it. Dumb.

I was jonesing for a Konica Minolta Dimage Z series, but after all these hours, I'm leaning more toward the FujiFilm FinePix s5100. Man that FujiFilm, they've got themselves one slick website. Look at all that Flash. Somebody got paid a lot of money to put that together.

Now all I need is this check for the indexing job. Here, money money money...

Anyway, if anyone (I know a lot of y'all are photographers, E, Allan, Philip, etc.) has an opinion on cameras you'd like to share, shoot them my way. I'm setting a $300 limit for myself (willing to go about $30 above that, but seeing as unless I decide on something that takes Compact Flash, I'll have to purchase memory too, and that costs extra moolah). Sweet gig about the FinePix is that if it's purchased through Amazon, I get free shipping *and* a 128MB card or $25 toward a bigger memory card (gee, I wonder which of those options I'll pick if I go for this camera). So that's something.

The vision gets weirder. The initial blind spot I had seems to be bigger than it was. Also, there are other things happening that don't make sense, like blurs or colors that show up sometimes but not all the time, notably when I move my focus from one thing to another quickly--I turn my head and for a split second, the thing I'm looking at has a black dot over it that goes away. I'm coping with this problem by trying not to think about it at all, but it's rather difficult as it's hard to not, you know, look at things. Even if I close my eyes, the shimmery dot of the abyss is still there, and the afterimages linger longer than they should.

Needless to say, this camera purchase will not be happening if the eye dude says on Thursday that my vision is biting the big one. Which I don't think will happen, but shit, weirder things have transpired in my life. Like that time I was on a roller coaster at Kings Island and a tornado ripped out the power to the park and we were stuck by our restraints in the roller coaster seats for 37 minutes because nobody had the guts to walk the track and unlock us with a tornado 200 yards away. Or like last night, when I dreamed my friend N. was a giant seal swimming from Antarctica to Sweden in three seconds flat.