Decisions Decisions

With the tax refund cheque and quite a bit of o/t I have the choise of
buying a small laptop ( 12") or a good camera. Both are for my trip and
whilst its months away the money is burning a hole in the pocket. If I dont
spend it now it will go on whorehouses and alchol.

So camera ? And then what camera out of Canon EOS350D or EOS20D ?

So laptop ? Dell 700m with 12.1" screen ?

 

In aus.motorcycles on Sun, 10 Jul 2005 01:11:37 +1000

iBook. Or Powerbook if you can afford it or buy one second hand.

You'll be surprised how much easier life gets with a Mac....

Zebee
- ready for the vi vs emacs war now

 

God 'ere we go.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/13/and_ninethly_thinkagain/

"On Sunday you're Thinking Different. On Monday you're a huge tool,
paying too much for slow, soon to be neglected hardware and waiting for
your chance to Think Like Everyone Else."

 

Hi Will
Don`t know if you`ve ever picked up a Canon 350, but, they are a huge camera
by modern standards.
My sister bought one and when she told me about it I couldn`t wait to get my
hands on it to try it out. But when I finally did I was shocked at the
physical size of the thing. It`s fair dinkum bigger than most video cameras.
Definately not pocket size :-(
regards

 

I'm confused, I fail to see the problem...

Bill_h

(remove the nospam bit for email)

 

Cue the age-old question of what are you going to be using each for? No
point in over-spending on word processors and 17-inch, 72dpi image
galleries ...
- sanbar

 

sorry Zee PC only for me

 

In April I am travelling around Oz on my bike. Now I would like a small
laptop
to transfer pics to from my current camera , keep a log of the journey,
listen
to music , maybe connect to the web and other computer stuff. I have a
laptop
that I take to work but its too big to take on my trip.

I am going to have the opportunity to get some good pictures on this trip so
getting a new camera would be good. Since I dont see myself making this
trip again I would like these pics to be good

 

If it were me, then (and it's not so consider this in part a jealous and
spiteful rebuff) then I'd forget the lappy and go for the camera and a
high-storage (~1Gb) memory card for the camera. The lappy's going to
have to deal with dust, humidity and rough handling in an environment
where there probably won't be too much protection from the elements, and
it doesn't read as though you'll be travelling far from the net cafe
route (had a look at the website).
Carrying a USB card reader would allow you to dump some pics from net
cafes (assuming the pics aren't too big or the connection too slow, or a
combination of both). The other option is to go for a high-memory
portable storage device that you can keep dumping pics to. Some even
store and play music. I know a few people who have done the memory
card/USB/storage device thing while travelling overseas and it's worked
well for them.
As for the trip log, pen meets paper, eh? Or blog it from the net cafe.
- sanbar

 

In aus.motorcycles on Sun, 10 Jul 2005 18:56:46 +1000

Laptops are fragile.

For music, get an MP3 player, keep the journey log in a notebook. For
web connection, use internet cafes, your chances of getting a way to
connect the laptop aren't much. For storing the pics, use a camera with
cards and either have many or else get one of the hard drive based card
readers, www.powerinnumbers.com.au has a few, they turn up on ebay too.

Else buy a cheap old 2nd hand laptop on ebay so you won't care too much
if it dies from dust or vibration or a getoff.

Zebee

 

Otter Boxes look good for this. Of course, if you get one big
enough for a laptop, there goes most of your luggage capacity.

Not to mention you'll constantly worry about leaving the damned
thing on the bike while you go see stuff, have lunch, hang about
the pub, etc.

Memory cards for digital cameras are cheap and rugged, and if you
take happy snaps at reduced resolution can fit a tremendous number
of photos. You're not going to be spending days setting up photos
and selling them as works of art, so don't bother taking a digital
SLR or similar top-end thingy, because you'll want to protect it
in its special box, etc, and so it'll be such a pain in the arse
to get out that you'll never take any photos. Buy a compact, 3MP
beastie which will fit in your jacket pocket (in a zip-lock bag
if it's raining) and you'll take many more photos ...

In short: take as few gizmos as possible, and none you'd be
terribly upset to destroy or leave behind. Well, that's what
I reckon anyway.

-----sharks

 

"Ninety percent of my salary I spent on booze and women ... and the
other ten percent I wasted." (Tug McGraw, Major League Baseball
pitcher) (also attributed to John Laws and George Best)

I agree with the other posters - I'd suggest something along the lines
of:

http://umart.net/au/product_info.php?cPath=65_217&products_id=100008

(as in the type of camera, not necessarily that particular model)

and pair it with something of this type

http://umart.net/au/product_info.php?cPath=105_306&products_id=3219
http://www.xs-drive.com/xsdrivepro/

Total cost circa $600, store heaps of photos, take up little room in
your bag and easily backed up to CD (shouldn't be too hard to find a
computer store or Internet cafe that will let you plug it into their PC
and backup to CD or DVD in case of HDD failure)

JL

 

Have you considered an iPod and one of these:

http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=159996

it lets you dump various memory card fomats onto the iPod drive without
needing a computer in between.

That'd solve the "transfer pics" and "listen to music" bits.

I'd probably go with Sharkeys suggestion though, memory cards for
cameras are dirt cheap these days, I got a 1 gig SD card a few months
back for ~$100, you could store a _lot_ of pictures on a handful of
them...

(actually, I'd most likely use the trip as an excuse to upgrade my old
iPod...)

big

 

<chanting>One of us, one of us</chanting>



big

 

In aus.motorcycles on Mon, 11 Jul 2005 13:51:20 +1000

Well, they gave me a powerbook...

I do note that I don't use it very much, it's been doing bugger all for
the last few months and only getting resurrected because my employer's
Windows support people can't get their bloody laptop working as I need
it to work on their bloody VPN so I bought an OSX VPN client and that
works nicely. (The Linux one's too old for my current linux kernels)

I'd use it more if the battery was working, but it needs replacement and
I haven't got around to it yet. I won't until the weather is better and
I feel like lazing around on the balcony.

The killer app for me was iRecord. I get heaps of stuff from the BBC
and ABC and transfer it to the iPod.

That's all done on an elderly iMac of the kind you can now buy 2nd hand
for about 300 bucks.

Zebee

 

Heh - I'm busy trying to resist the urge to buy a new 60gig iPod for
~$600AUD instead of a replacement battery for my old 5gig one for
~$29USD...

big

 

you and zeebee have the same idea and I think thats the way I will be going

the only problem is I can still remember our science teacher saying to me a
pig
can write better then you to which I replied ... "can you " . not 6 of the
best but
3 plus detention

 

A 40 g notebook HDD in a USB2 case shouldn't cost too much (I put
together a 30g one earlier this year for $130). If you have a 1g card
in the camera, you drop into internet cafes every week or so and
transfer images to the protable drive. Takes up a lot less room. You
can't listen to the notebook while you ride, that's what minidisks are
for. For the diary, how about a pda with a folding keyboard?

Moike

 

40 grams ? Shoite that's light ! Where'd you get that from ?

JL

 

pedant.

Moike

;-)