A picture is worth a thousand words… and at least $100
Friday, August 4th, 2006Travel junkies like to tell you that you don’t need any material goods in order to travel and you shouldn’t spend any money on things before your trip. They are lying. Either that or they all already own the things that you will need and assume that the rest of us do to. Damn them!
This is all to say that today I went out and bought a digital camera. I’ll be doing a lot of traveling and when one travels things often get lost or stolen. I figured that I should buy a cheaper camera so I won’t feel as bad when, inevitably, for one reason or another, said camera is no longer in my possession. That, and I’m cheap.
So, I walked into CompUSA to find that all of their cameras were over $100. All except for one: the Vivitar Vivicam for $99. It actually seemed like a really great camera. It’s got 6 mega pixels and 3X optical zoom. Those things sound cool don’t they? The downsides were that the guy who sold it to me looked at me funny for buying such a cheapo camera and it’s only as cheap as $99 after rebates, before rebates, it’s $160.
I hate rebates. I think everybody hates them. I can’t imagine how one could not hate them. You know that they exist because the manufacturers are counting on you to flake out and not collect your money. So that makes you try doubly hard to get that rebate check to your door. But they make it so damn hard, that most of the time, you just end up scratching your head and wondering how the date to collect your rebate came and went so fast. If this ends up happening to me, I will be the sucker who bought a Vivitar camera when I could have bought a Canon.
Oh, and I also bought a $10 camera case, came home and found out that there was a case in the camera box already. And everybody here speaks English. This does not bode well.
-sarah
P.S. Since I’m new to this digital camera thing, does anyone know the best way to store photos while traveling? Can I plug my camera into any computer, or do I need to bring the CD that formats the computer to recognize the camera with me when I travel? And once I get my pictures onto a computer, then what? Are there websites that I can upload them to for free? Thanks for the help!
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