It’s taken about a year of hemming and hawing, but today I finally placed an order for a brand new camera.

One of the things that made shopping so difficult is that I’m not a photographer and have no desire to learn anything about photography. My brain’s full enough as it is!

How I narrowed down my choices was by listing my ‘must haves’ and then eliminating cameras one by one until only one remained. My list will make photographers laugh. The new camera must:

-Have easy to access buttons. I have big fingers with little dexterity. My current Exilim is excellent–it has a few, very well defined, well spaced out, buttons;

-Be easy to hold. My Exilim isn’t. I like how the Canons have a curvature in the front that makes them easy to grip;

-Not use regular-type batteries. I’ve taken thousands of photos with my Exilim over three years and am still on the original Casio lithium battery that lasts me a week taking hundreds of pictures a day;

-Make it easy to transfer the pictures. My Exilim has a dock that plugs into my Powerbook and iMac via USB. I just put the camera on the dock, click a button on it, and iPhoto opens;

-Be small. I can tuck my Exilim into a coat pocket;

-Have enough memory to hold several hundred pictures at a time;

-Be able to take many pictures in rapid succession, which is where my Exilim fails miserably. It’s a camera that only takes pictures when it’s good and ready rather than at my convenience;

-Have a big view screen. The Exilim’s screen is almost as big as my iPod Touch screen;

-Have enough megapixels to take pictures that will look nice when reduced to 500×500 or so on a blog;

-Be robust; I didn’t like having to worry about my camera last year on the Chilkoot;

-Have pleasing aesthetics;

-Price isn’t the foremost consideration, but less than $250CAD would be great.

And the winner, coming in at a reasonable amount over $250CAD is…

Pentax Optio W90 in Pistachio Green!

I debated waiting till August to get the camera since it will be coming out in orange, but decided that the green will do. 😀

I was going to order it off of amazon.ca for 299.99USD+shipping, the best price I’d seen, but further Googling revealed Abes of Maine, which had it on sale for 241.99USD+shipping. At that price, it was worth my adding a 4GB memory card (my current camera has just 1GB). The invoice just landing in my inbox and the total is 306.89USD. Even with the memory card, I’m at less than what amazon.ca would have charged me! Joe at Abes and I have been emailing back and forth all morning tweaking the order and I am thus far very impressed with the service.

The camera won’t be here for my trip next week (days off, yay!!!), but I will have it for my journey to Inuvik in August. I’m rather looking forward to seeing if the Pentax’s pictures of Tombstone will be any different from the Casio’s.