I had forgotten all about this page!  I see it and I have to laugh, as I have gone headfirst back into digital photography.  I decided to reenter the market after six years with film in 2003, somewhat after Canon introduced the D60.  Great camera, but in 2006, I replaced it with a Canon EOS 5D from B & H Photo Video.  In addition to leveraging my existing investment in Canon lenses, the 5D is really my first "no compromise" camera.  It has all of the features of the film cameras I've owned and in many cases is better.

So, for posterity...

Well, I've finally given up on digital cameras.  I've decided instead to invest in conventional photography along with the Hewlett Packard PhotoSmart system.  PhotoSmart is a scanner which only does slides, negatives & prints, at resolutions up to 2400 dpi, along with a printer, which uses special inks and paper to make prints at 600 dpi that are so good that most people can't tell the difference.

So, now, finally, we can take pictures on film, post them onto the web site as soon as they're developed, and make copies of the truly great images to use elsewhere.

The   Sony Mavica was my latest and possibly final attempt at making do with a digital camera.  The Mavica is an incredible improvement over the Casio QV-300 that I tried previously.   The camera takes fine pictures, has excellent battery life, uses a strong flash and saves the pictures to floppy diskette, making them very convenient to use with multiple machines.  We enjoyed using it, and loved the battery life, but found that the resolution simply wasn't good enough.

This was the first year that Leesa and I spent Christmas in Grapevine.  We were very impressed with how elaborately our neighbors decorated their houses!  Leesa also took the holiday spirit and made her own wreaths.
 

We previously experimented with a Casio QV-300 Digital Camera. The picture quality is better than previous versions from Casio and we really have only three complaints:

• It eats batteries like crazy. We have only been able to squeeze out thirty or so pictures before the replace batteries notice comes on.
• It needs lots of light to take a good picture. Interior light doesn't seem to be enough for most quality pictures.
• The price of $699 is still way too high.

On the other hand, we do like being able to squeeze off lots of pictures and keep only the ones that turn out, and it's nice to be able to email the pictures directly from the included software. The Casio Japan site that we link to above is much nicer that the one based in the U.S.

We ultimately decided to return it and wait for the technology to mature.