Thanks to the miracle known as eBay my replacement friend arrived about a week ago. What is it do you ask? A gently used Powershot S50. I paid $90 for the camera and $30 for an extended battery so I’ve got an essentially new camera for about 1/2 the cost of a new one.

Yeah it’s not the new gigapixel blah de blah… but I wanted a compact camera. The S50 stretches compact a bit, but it fits in my motorcycle dashboard and that’s what I use as the definition of compact. It’s also got raw and a full manual mode.

Why not the gigapixel camera? Compacts don’t have great lenses. Megapixels can be more marketing vs actual quality because not enough light can get back to the sensor to make that much of a difference. I look around the office and I like the pictures that are on the wall that the S50 took. Why replace a great thing?