I’m afraid I might have a slight case of the new camera bug.

We have several cameras.

Each one has its strengths and weaknesses. I bought the one on the left, a little Canon Elph, to take with me when I traveled for work. The really neat thing about it is that it can fit into a pocket easily. The bad thing is that it is extremely slow. It’s slow to take a picture, which can be maddening if you want to catch a specific moment, and it is slow to cycle so that you can take another picture. It’s so maddening that we bought the next camera to the right, a Nikon S9700.

The little Nikon is still barely pocketable. It has a wide zoom ratio, and it has some nice features that make it a little more than just a point-and-shoot. It also suffers a little from slowness, although not nearly as much as the Canon. Its main drawback is that it has trouble focusing a little more often than it should.

The next camera is an Olympus EPL1, an early mirrorless, interchangeable-lens camera. It’s a decent camera, but it’s also a little slow to cycle from one shot to the next. It has a larger sensor, so theoretically it can take “better” photos than the first two.

The last one is a Nikon D60, one of the older Nikon amateur cameras. It is a very nice camera. It takes good photos and it has little trouble focusing. It’s relatively quick to shoot. Its main drawback is its size. Look at it compared to the others. We end up just not taking it with us because it takes a commitment. For instance, I would never take it into the Dark Side of the Moon bar, where we have been going for jazz Tuesdays.

Tuesday of last week I took the little Nikon S9700. I was wearing cargo pants and it fit reasonably well into the big leg pocket. I fiddled a little with it, turned it from fully automatic to manual and adjusted the light sensitivity (ISO) and took this shot.

We know the bartender, but, I’m sorry to have to say that we have forgotten his name. We’ll remedy that next time we go.

I took another shot after we left. This one is taken from the same location as one I took the previous week with my iPhone. The Nikon shot is quite a bit better.

For example, the streetlight is much better rendered.

We also found this fellow on Broad Street.

The iPhone takes good movies. So does the little Nikon.

I wanted to post this one because it shows the neat cycling colors on the liquor shelf, plus you can hear the band a little — not well, but at least it has that bar ambiance. You can’t tell how loud the band is from this video. My ears were just barely not ringing when we left the bar.

So what does all this mean for a slight case of new camera fever? And why do I have it anyway? Well, since we never take the big Nikon, there’s no reason to keep it. It takes good pictures but if we never carry it, it doesn’t take any pictures. The small Canon has great pocketability, but its picture-taking is just too frustrating. So there’s no reason to keep that. The Olympus is showing its technological age, so I think it needs to go as well. The little Nikon has that big zoom, and it takes reasonably decent pictures. It can also fit into a big pocket. But I want something a little better. A successor to the Olympus, one model older than the current model, remedies most of the old Olympus’s drawbacks and it can be had with an extra tele-zoom lens for quite a reasonable cost. It’s biggest drawback is that in its current form, with a kit short zoom, it won’t fit into any pocket in any clothes that I currently wear.

What I’d like to do, if Leah agrees to it, is to keep the little Nikon to carry around in my pocket (if I’m wearing cargo pants) and get the newer Olympus for some more serious photography. There is even a very short lens available for it that would make it only a little bigger than the little Nikon. It’s even a reasonable price, but maybe a little hard to justify for our current situation.

Leah and I will have to have a discussion of the pros and cons.