Last week, I bought a camera to replace my Acer. Although I wrote the following blog about it, I never actually got round to finishing it to what I would have liked, but here it is anyway…

Both of my regular viewers can’t have failed to ntice that I’ve been blogging more and more about the slow demise of my trusty little Acer camera – the pocket-sized photomaker that has travelled with me everywhere in the last 5 or so years.

After much umming and ahhing, I decided to upgrade to a Canon Pwershot A480 (and thanks to regular commeter Marko for spotting it £20 cheaper than what I was originally going to pay).

It was reserved from the Argos website Wednesday night, and picked up on Thursday morning, and it was a lot easier than I imagined. I’ve stayed away from Argos for buying stuff, mainly because I didn’t like their “check-in” system – I’ve been there in the past to buy something, only to find when I got there, it was out of stock. Obviously, this has happened with many other things, in many other stores over the years, but it seems a lot more of a piss-take when you visit a shop, type the product you want into a computer, only to find that “Computer Says No”…

I was happy to find that they have some type of “reserve” option on their site, so you can reserve items, visit the local store and then pay for the item when you get there. Many places probably do this, but it’s the first time I’ve ever used such a system. As much as I love technology, I absolutely despise “self service” checkouts, to the point where I refuse to use them.

I arrived, just after 9AM to find that the shop was empty, meaning that I was able to… *shudder*… use the “self service” checkout, pay for it via a card, pick it up and walk out in under a minute. The trip to the town was probably the quickest I’ve had, with only a stop off at Home Bargains to pick up some cheap cans of coke, before I headed to the bus stop.

It’s the first time I’ve bought a camera from an actual shop, so to celebrate this fact, I wanted to make a video of its arrival.

I’m all for a bit of bandwagon jumping, so I thought it would be a bit interesting to create an “unboxing” video. Normally, these are for expensive “Squee! I got one!” products like a new version of the applezPhone or the uPad, but as I don’t actually have one to unbox, you’ll have to make do with a “Cheaply priced camera from Argos”…

I do apologise for the fart. I don’t really.

I’m pretty impressed with the camera so far, even though I’ve not had chance to make use of it properly. Thursday was the first day back to work for me, so although I’ve had a little play, I’ve not looked at it properly. The first image taken was this…

… which was taken during the recording of the unboxing video. I’m not going to create a gallery about my test shots like I did with the Acer, instead I’m going to leave that up to Flickr. Of course, this doesn’t mean I won’t write a bit of a review about it.

One thing I already love about the video is the macro mode, it’s certainly impressive. This close-up of a hawthorn flower should show you what I mean…

Obviously, the 500px version there isn’t up to much. Click it, view it as original, etc. It’s stunning. The detail of the droplets, small cobwebs, etc, is something that my full-size Canon can’t accomplish with its stock lens. The other macro photos in that set also show off the strength of the camera.