The Lion's Den

I Want My PowerShot G5!

I have wanted a new camera for quite a while now. At the time I have a little 35mm point and shoot instamatic and a Polaroid camera both of work fine but are feature poor and do not provide very high quality images. I made the decision to go digital during a trip I took to Hawaii in 2001 where I took a set of photos of the beautiful Hawaii beach not realizing the film in the camera was leftover Kodak Tri-X I had used to capture grainy black and white low light snaps of New York subways and buildings. Imagine my delight when I developed the film to find twentysomeodd shots of noir style tropical flowers and beaches. At that moment I resolved that my next vacation would be captured in a digital instant-gratification format.

I have had a good idea what kind of digital camera I wanted since then but have not been able to justify the expenditure because 1. The cameras were improving so quickly in 2001 that it seemed worth waiting for prices to come down and pixel resolution go up and 2. I did not have a good 'reason' to chuck out that much cash. Earlier this year I became convinced that you could get a hell of a lot of camera for under $600 at the same time as I was reading a filmmaking book, which seduced me with the idea of exercising my artistic muscles. Some research on the web and talks with friends who had their cameras led me to a short list of important features:

* Ability to override aperture, shutter speed and any other features I can
* Good quality in low light shots
* Compact and Light
* Decent resolution (defined at the time as at least 3 megapixels)
* Good value

Which quickly led to a selection between the Canon PowerShot A70 and the PowerShot G5, a choice that the G5 quickly won because of it's swivel LCD (good for overhead crowd shots as well as Macro photography) and the remote control (necessary for stop motion animation). Months of wanting but not justifying were settled by a tax filing which suggested a healthy enough return to cover the camera, media card, tripod and carrying case.

Last week I started the price hunt and found that while the G5 can be bought for as little as $400 the web sites with these prices are commonly shunned as 'scam artists' or just plain bad business. I started looking for a local reseller willing to sell the camera for $500 (the suggested retail price is $600) and came across something unexpected: Best Buy did not carry the camera. This was quite odd and a bit disappointing because I had decided that if the price was in the right range I would drive out to the Clackamas store on my way home and pick me up a new camera and because I know that Sven picked his camera up at a Best Buy. Suspicious I decided to call the store and was notified that they DID carry the model until recently but had sold off their stock in anticipation of a new replacement model.

Did someone say NEW MODEL? As in all new features for probably the same price? Of course my gadetius-ganglia (the part of the brain responsible for inciting desire for gadgets in Homo Sapiens Geekedus) got all twitirpated imagining the possibilities (what you say, ANOTHER megapixel?! Surely this cannot be so!) or that failing the possibility of the G5 price dropping even further. Back to the web and a round of visiting the usual suspects (http://www.dpreview.com/, http://www.powershot.com/, http://www.dcviews.com/news.htm, http://www.digitalcamera-hq.com/) which gave me a big fat nada on news or expected product releases. At this point I am at a bit of a loss. I have decided that the wise course of action is to wait and see if I can find out what the G5 replacement is and when it will be released, but I don't know a good source or that kind of information short of weekly visits to the PowerShot web site. Anyone out there knows what is up with Canon or care to direct me to a good digital photography news source?