Back in 2005 I bought my first digital camera, a little waterproof Pentax. It was all I could afford at the time and I loved it:

The Digi, a great little camera

I got some fabulous shots using that camera, some which won me prizes at the camera club I used to go to. But after going to that club for a while I got to feeling I ought to have a proper camera. I’d used an SLR camera for many years and I’d done some basic training in photography as part of my TAFE certificate course, so I felt confident that I could cope with a digital SLR:

The SLR, for proper photography

It’s a good camera, but I never grew to love it. For a start, it argues with me. If there isn’t enough light it won’t take the shot, which is annoying when I want the shot to be underexposed or blurry. Of course, there’s probably a setting for that, but to go hunting for it usually means losing the moment. It’s heavy, so not always great for taking pics of craft projects. I stick to using it when I need to use a zoom or wide-angle lens, or do something specific. But the weight of it proved to be a huge problem when I had to lug it around Canada in 2009, giving me headaches and back pain, so I don’t take it on holidays.

I would have taken The Digi, but by then the on/off switch had stopped working and it was cheaper to replace it than fix it. Replace it I did, with the same model but more recent version:

The Replacement, The Sucky Camera, The Distortion Machine… you get the picture

And I hated it. It distorted things, making craft projects look odd and people strangely squat. The clerk at the shop I bought my new camera at agreed, and said the original version had excellent Pentax-manufactured lenses but later ones had crap outsourced ones. Like the SLR, it refused to take photos when it thought the conditions weren’t perfect for a shot, which seemed to be most of the time. I took it overseas last year and wound up using my iPhone instead. Paul used it after his camera was stolen and he quickly started cursing and fighting with it.

For while now Paul has had a new Pentax camera in mind for me that might be a solution, but he wanted to wait for the price to come down. When it did we had a look at it, and I liked what I saw:

The Cutie, from the front

It has more options than Digi but isn’t as heavy as an SLR. The lens is a plain old ordinary non-distorting kind (the trade-off being that zoom is me getting closer to it or trimming the photo). I can switch it for a zoom lens if needed.

The Cutie, from the top

While this new camera does occasionally argue with me I can program settings into a little dial and switch to a ‘take blurry or underexposed photos’ mode (not that I’ve tried this yet, but it’s nice to know I can). So far I’ve loved working with it and the photos it produces. I have yet to see if it works well in holiday situations or flash photos of people, but so far so good.

Paul found an old camera case to carry it in, which shined up nicely with clear leather conditioner:

Unashamedly hipster camera case

And I have to admit, I think it’s just so cuuuute!