I’ve been totally getting into my TIDE project whilst in Costa Rica, really loving the craziness of having a waterproof camera and continually congratulating myself for buying the Pentax W60, that was until it broke last week.

Ironically (and annoyingly) it’s all still waterproof and functional, the problem is the screen has packed in so you can’t see what your taking or adjust the settings & modes, not ideal. I could get by (just) as it’s presently set to ‘AUTO’ which is *OK* for a selection of ocean shots as it’s a somewhat wild and random activity anyway (which is most of the fun..!), however it would be nice to be able to choose the underwater mode or make a movie.

Luckily we’re in Florida now for ten days so I took advantage of the facilities on offer and dropped into Best Buy yesterday for a pre-researched Olympus Tough 6000 purchase (which they had), however on the next stand I noticed the *just released* groovy little Fuji Z33, ooh, a $100 cheaper too, best have a play with it. Initially I wasn’t impressed with the in-store test shots but after dropping the ISO from 1600 (doh..!) to the statutory 100 things became acceptably sharper and I bought it there and then ($199 – bargain).

As a former Nikon pixel poker I was quite amused at myself and the resulting choices for the purchase, times are indeed a changing as I bought it without even checking the lens diameter (I’d previously never touch anything less wide than 28mm), quite amusing also considering the nature of me as a self confessed geek to drop technical specification into last place. The combined process was more or less as follows -

• It looked nice and caught my eye (it’s blue)
• It was waterproof
• It was cheap
• It took SD cards (which I have)

The lens diameter I honestly never bothered to check until I got home, nor was I bothered about the mega-pixel density (well let’s admit it, all compacts are much of a muchness in that area these days, and who really needs 12mp in a compact), however am I over geeking geek-ness here? I’d like to think it’s not all 0′s & 1′s with both aesthetics and an eye for design also in our mix somewhere, take my personal choice of (personal) computer for example. I use an Apple Mac partly for it’s design construction (I love the Air) but predominantly for the way the OSX operating system functions (I’m not interested in a Mac as purely a lifestyle choice). As a Linux developer I love and use it’s UNIX base with resulting stability being a distinct no brainer against the flakiness of Microsoft. Yes I could use Ubuntu but for computing on a personal level it’s iTunes which is my achilles heel, mind you in the new world of Spotify (it’s playing to me now) even that’s dropped a few notches down the ‘can’t live without’ it list (although I do still need my iPod sync-up).

Anyway, yes, I have (another) new camera, and I suppose at the end of the day my choices for buying it were just different to those of cameras I’ve had in the past, I’ll let you know how I get on with it.

The question is – did I buy the right colour? Now I’m having a dilemma……..

*UPDATE* – The supplied software is garbage, it doesn’t connect via USB to OSX, nor can I get it to do so (wish I’d brought my card reader…! )