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Fredrider	Camera Upgrade		Lead	[-]
Posts: 5701 05/08/07 6:02 AM	Tags : None Sometime ago I was thinking of upgrading from my 3.2 mega-pixel, 6x optical zoom Fujifilm camera to a 6 or 7 mega-pixel camera with 3x optical zoom as well as manual settings, a light meter, fast shutter speed, short shutter lag and image stabilization. Regarding the optical zoom part of that my thinking is I am happy with the resolution on the 3 mega-pixel cameras and a 6x optical at 3 MP is the same as a 3x optical, 2x digital at 6 MP. All of the features I want have existed for the last two or three years. I have just been waiting for the price to get to something I am willing to pay. Time must have been slipping by me un-noticed because I found the Pentax Optio M20 has all those features except the short shutter lag time and I got one from UBid.com yesterday for $99 plus $19 S&H. Further, I remember paying $54 plus shipping for a 256MB XD card a few years ago to go with my Fujifilm camera. I got a 2GB SD card for $21 plus $4.95 S&H to go with my Pentax camera. That should store 600-700 pictures or 30 min. of VGA quality video. I am so surprised. All that for under $150! I am not too unhappy about the typical digital camera shutter lag with the Pentax. It also has a feature where I can take 5 pictures in succession. Whenever I am trying to capture high resolution stills of moving objects, like motorcycles, horses, etc. I will try that feature. It is better than the pot luck that I have been living with with my Fujifilm which can only take one picture at a time. If I do not care as much about the resolution I can alway just take video with the Pentax. One thing about the buying experience that was startling is Amazon.com raised the price of the camera by $11 during my buying session, then when I was checking around for a better deal, they raised the price of shipping from $25 to $30. I dropped them like a sack of potatoes. Have you ever had this happen to you? It almost seemed like someone was watching my purchase, seeing my hesitation and instead of encouraging me by lowering the price, they kept raising the price hoping I would buy before the price got too high. As it turned out I saved $35 by going to UBid.com and FlashMemoryStore.com. I have been reading articles about how advertisers can now watch your keystrokes and place ads specifically targeting you. And I have noticed most of my e-mails I get from companies are advertising motorcycles, and as well the banner ads on websites I frequent, such as weather websites, are all Harley-Davidson ads. I never before felt someone was actually watching my keystrokes or a purchase I was making. I guess it could have been coincidence that both the prices of the camera and the shipping increased during my buying session with Amazon yesterday, but it seems suspicious to me. Has anybody ever had this happen to them? Do you think anybody is actually watching purchases that closely that they will change the price based on what they think they can get you to pay? Fred Last Edited By: Fredrider 05/08/07 6:32 AM. Edited 1 time.
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alepel		#1	[url]	[-]
Posts: 7575 05/08/07 7:13 AM	Fred....several years ago I was assigned to work on Eastman Kodak's website. It was my job to monitor activity around our various pages, such as where a person was before they got to your sight, where they went when on your site. how you moved around within your site, what you were reading and how long you spent time there. If you left where you went. Did you come back to the site and from where. I could go on and on. It literally amazed me the amount of detail that could be gathered. During the assignment I was involved with several companies who 'sold' us software that enabled this kind of detailed analysis. Some of course do all of this better than others. The point of this is that none of these companies could provide constant and live monitoring. The information gathering tools was just not that sophisticated. The fastest feedback we could get was 12 hours. I have doubts that website analysis like you are suggesting is possible. It would take an incredible amount of manpower to monitor the kind of activity you are suggesting. To do that kind of real time monitoring would take a lot of people. That is an expense the industry could not sustain and still be profitable. Could some kind of software be put into place to react to your shopping trends. I suppose so. I think I have seen this happen in the Car Rental business. My wife goes out to LA twice a year to visit her family and friends. Airfare is never the issue with us on these trips. It is the cost of car rentals. I've been learning how to get good at it for the past seven years, because I feel like I am dealing with a computer. We always rent from Enterprise in LA. They repeatedly have the best prices and I have been successful at getting very low cost rentals. I was able to find out that car rentals, at least in LA, are based on supply and demand. Too many cars on hand and the price goes down. Not enough and the price goes up. Reserve a car enough into the future the demand is low and the price is high. Or so it would seem. Here is where I see the fluctuations occurring. I have learned that I have to monitor the Enterprise web site two, three sometimes four times a day. That's right a day. The prices for car rentals can change within a 30 minute period. So I reserve my wife's car 30 days in advance. That locks the rate. Then I constantly monitor the Enterprise website and when I see the weekly rate go down, I do a change of reservation. I typically change the time of pick up by 30 minutes. That causes the Enterprise computer to rebook at the then current rate. Ideally Enterprise would like to catch me with a higher rate but it works the other way too. I get the lower rate. I keep monitoring the site and when the rate changes downward I change the reservation again and move the pick up time forward 30 minutes. This then locks in the lower rate. I have done this as many as four times on one reservation. My success at doing this has saved me hundreds. I have seen rental rates go from $235 a week and I get them down to $118 a week. All of this because the computers are working based on supply and demand. It changes so fast that one has to react to it. So is it possible that this same sort of thing is happening to you. Possibly. Sorry for the long winded answer, but then you know me. Alain
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NC tourer		#2	[url]	[-]
HSATF 1st Officer Posts: 513 05/08/07 7:21 AM	Dang, this was a very interesting read. Some good information Alain!
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alepel		#3	[url]	[-]
Posts: 7575 05/08/07 7:41 AM	Turst your feeling better Mark? alepel
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Fredrider		#4	[url]	[-]
Posts: 5701 05/08/07 11:13 AM	Alain, Your detailed and insightful comments are very much appreciated. Regarding my Amazon non-buying session I am glad to hear that nobody was looking over my shoulder while I was trying to buy a camera on Sunday. It is possible that since Amazon has a collection of suppliers each with only so much product on hand, that at first they had me "scheduled" with the lowest cost supplier and later on when that supplier sold-out its current inventory I was "scheduled" with another supplier. Following along these line it is possible that a third Amazon came into the picture when the second supplier cleared out its inventory of Pentax Optio M20 cameras and a third supplier with the same price but a higher S&H fee was presented to me. Or it could have been a computer program responding to supply & demand like Enterprise uses. Thanks for the tips regarding Enterprise. I am about to make a car rental reservation for San Francisco in July. The information you provided should come in handy. Fred
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alepel		#5	[url]	[-]
Posts: 7575 05/08/07 11:31 AM	Fred....I think that you hit the nail on the head with your analogy about suppliers and inventory. That to me at least sounds plausible. I don't know if you've ever noticed how the travel sites (at least Orbitz) now show when the number of seats available on a flight are down to one available. Tell me something. If the travel site can tell me there is only one seat available why can't they tell me that there are 10, or 5 or 2? Why only 1? And if there is only one then what do I do. Go to the flight costing more? Or would you go elsewhere. What purpose does it serve to tell you that there is only one seat left on the cheaper flight. Has to make you think. Or maybe there isn't just one seat left, but I am made to think so. Good luck with your car rental in San Francisco. Remember to check often. At least once in the morning and once again in the afternoon. You'll be surprised by what you see happen. PS....sounds to me like we're all going to be treated to some more of Fred's astonishing picture taking in San Francisco with this new digital camera. YooHoo. alepel
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CleRider		#6	[url]	[-]
Posts: 1902 05/08/07 2:13 PM	Fred, Thanks for doing the legwork on this. As is so happens, the Minolta Dimage Xt I bought four years ago is on it's last leg. Just found out Konica/Minolta got out of the camera biz in 2006. I just bought a M20 from ubid and going to pick up a SD card at Circuit City tonight. Thanks Andy
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alepel		#7	[url]	[-]
Posts: 7575 05/08/07 2:40 PM	Andy....check out Radio Shack first for memory cards. I bought a SanDisk 1 gig card for under $20 and they have others. alepel
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Fredrider		#8	[url]	[-]
Posts: 5701 05/08/07 4:14 PM	Andy, You are most welcome. You are the one that put me on this track by showing me how much easier it is to stop the bike and take a picture by pulling a small camera out of your pocket rather than having to dig into a saddlebag for a much larger camera. In general I have been happy with my bigger camera, but I am very much looking forward to the convenience of the smaller Pentax especially since it has so many better features. One of the things I did not mention previously about the Optio M20 is that it is not the smallest size of camera, the ultra compact-pocketable cameras, but on the other hand it still fits in a pocket plus it uses 2 AA batteries rather than a special shaped, high price battery that you must buy two of so one can be charging while you are using the other one. My bigger camera also uses AA batteries. I like that about both my cameras. Have you read the profession camera review at Steve's Digicams? Steve picks the Pentax Optio M20 as one of the eleven best cameras in the 6-10 mega-pixel range. http://www.steves-digicams.com/best_cameras.html Steve's pages pertaining to the Pentax Optio M20 can be accessed through the following links: Introduction, Physical View & Specifications http://www.steves-digicams.com/2007_reviews/optio_M20.html Features & Controls http://www.steves-digicams.com/2007_reviews/optio_M20_pg2.html Steve's Conclusions http://www.steves-digicams.com/2007_reviews/optio_M20_pg5.html Sample Pictures http://www.steves-digicams.com/2007_reviews/optio_M20_samples.html Steve has a few more pages on the Optio M20 to look through if you are interested. Fred
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Fredrider		#9	[url]	[-]
Posts: 5701 05/08/07 8:34 PM	Andy, One of the times that you stopped your Wing and pulled your small camera out of your pocket to take a picture was when we were riding in a remote, mountainous part of West Virginia. We were surprised by a strikingly large antenna that appeared from around a bend. We never expected to see such a massively huge structure out in the middle of seemingly nowhere. It looks like that structure was used over the last several years to determine that Mercury has a liquid core, something that the scientists previously had found hard to believe since logically Mercury was thought to have cooled so quickly that it all its mass would have frozen into a solid. "Kitchen physics dictates that a raw egg will spin slower than a hard-boiled one. Scientists using this same logic have discovered the planet Mercury has a fluid core of molten iron. The finding, detailed in the May 4 issue of the journal Science, solves a 30-year-old mystery but raises another. To figure out whether Mercury's core was liquid or solid, a team of scientists led by Jean-Luc Margot at Cornell University measured small twists in the planet's rotation. They used a new technique that involved bouncing a radio signal sent from a ground telescope in California off the planet and then catching it again in West Virginia. After 5 years and 21 such observations, the team realized their values were twice as large as what would be expected if Mercury's core was solid. "The variations in Mercury's spin rate that we measured are best explained by a core that is at least partially molten," Margot said. "We have a 95 percent confidence level in this conclusion." More at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18473759/ Fred Last Edited By: Fredrider 05/26/07 8:27 PM. Edited 1 time.
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CleRider		#10	[url]	[-]
Posts: 1902 05/09/07 9:07 AM	Fred, Thanks for the telescope info. That was one of the three things that had me puzzled during the trip. The other was "How in the world do the skiers get up the Snowshoe mountain road in the winter" and "Why is CR 10/2 on the map to begin with"? BTW, last fall, before our NY Miata trip I bought a Canon S3 which takes great pics. I used that camera on the ES trip. The S3 can be used as a point-and-shoot but also has enough features to rival a mid-range 35mm setup. The only problem is it's size, almost too big to take in a Miata Andy
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Skip MMShadowT		#11	[url]	[-]
Posts: 5460 05/09/07 8:49 PM	How in the world do the skiers get up the Snowshoe mountain road in the winter I've often thought the same thing. "We want to be free... Free to ride our machines without being hassled by the man!"
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Fredrider		#12	[url]	[-]
Posts: 5701 05/10/07 8:20 PM	I have to give UBid.com props. My camera came this evening, just 3 days and about 5 hours after I ordered it. Very impressive! Fortunately I got one of the good ones. Of the approximately 4 dozen owner's comments I read two people had to return their Pentax Optio M20 cameras because they could not get clear pictures no matter what mode the pictures were taken in. Ordering a camera where there is some significant risk, maybe 4% or 5%, had me worrying if I would get a good one or a bad one. I have only taken two pictures so far, but both of them are crystal clear and are still fairly clear after I zoom up 8 times on the taken pictures. Way cool! Fred
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alepel		#13	[url]	[-]
Posts: 7575 05/11/07 9:42 AM	Hey Fred.....since I no longer work for Eastman Kodak any longer, I guess that I can read all this talk about this Pentax camera. It doesn't really matter anyway, most digital cameras manufactured in the world are actually made by only three camera manufactures. Oooops....did I say that. Alain
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Fredrider		#14	[url]	[-]
Posts: 5701 05/11/07 11:03 AM	And which three would they be Alain? Inquiring minds want to know. Sounds like batteries. There are only three manufacturers of AA type batteries too. All of the other many brands are just private label products of the three actual manufacturers. Fred
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CleRider		#15	[url]	[-]
Posts: 1902 05/11/07 11:13 AM	Fred, Mine came in yesterday too. Forturnately I also got a good one. Snapped about a dozen pics of the dogs at the park and a few of a baseball stuck in the middle of my daughters windshield. Seems the JV baseball team was taking batting practice and didn't bother to ask the teachers to move their cars. Looks like the athletic director just bought himself a windshield. Andy
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