Unless you are a professional photographer, taking digital pictures has been, up until now, a royal pain. Most digital cameras a) suck up batteries b) store few images and c) take lousy pictures.  For we’ve been living in the early “Brownie” or “Instamatic” period of digital photography.   Costly digital cameras may have been simple to use but transferring and manipulating imagery was usually user-hostile.  For quality photography, film reigned supreme.  Now, the film camera is in its death throes.

Sure, film cameras have had better lenses and don’t run out of batteries every minute. You can take rolls of film and a bunch of cameras off to Cameroon and you won’t have to lug chargers and computers and other hardware to download your images. But digital cameras have made the great leap forward: cameras now accept high quality lenses… new storage media now handles up to a thousand images… batteries truly last and last. Finally, USB connections and/or easy docking stations link cameras to computers and easy-to-use software is available for fast image manipulation and sharing.

This week, my brother and I went off on vacation to Orlando on a digital-photo safari: taking a host of digital cameras, especially Canon's D-30, to capture the fabulous animals surrounding Disney's new Animal Kingdom Lodge which opened this week.  (Click here to see several animal shots taken with the with a 400 MM lens)

Canon's D-30 >>>>

We used a wide series of fine Canon EOS lenses (the same used on the wildly popular EOS film cameras) and captured extremely high-resolution (3.3 megapixel) images without the film. Using Canon’s hot D-30 camera, literally hundreds of images were stored on our choice of IBM 340 Meg or 1 Gig microdrives. Now, I’ll admit this new digital Canon camera body presently costs about $3,000! But, according to Canon, the relatively inexpensive CMOS chip developed for these cameras will soon be rolled out on a whole new array of significantly less expensive EOS digital cameras. These CMOS chips will also significantly reduce the amount of battery power needed for taking quality pictures. The era of taking professional-quality photographs using digital cameras and top-notch lenses is truly at hand. go to >> Canon's D-30

Canon's Digital Elph S300>>>>

Canon has also come out with a new digital Elph S300 camera featuring a 3X optical zoom. This handsome handheld is ultra light and compact but uses a 2.11 megapixel  CCD to record images at high quality. There’s something fabulously elegant about how a full-fledged camera emerges from a tiny brick I could hide in my palm. Suggested list $599 go to >> Canon's Digital Elph S300

HP PhotoSmart 912 Digital Camera >>>>

This week, HP also began shipping its HP Photosmart 912. This new digital camera ($799) delivers the “control, performance and flexibility of an SLR camera.” One of the nifty “add-ons” I liked about the HP Photosmart 912 is the cute little wireless remote that lets you take pictures of yourself in the timer mode. I also enjoyed the one-button elegance of sending a picture I just took, via HP JetSend infrared technology, to an HP Printer. No fuss, no muss, and instant prints… go to >> HP Photosmart 912

HP PhotoSmart 1215 Color Printer >>>>

...which leads me to the HP Photosmart 1215 Color Printer. Photo-quality printing at the touch of a button from the camera. I loved this! In addition to the usual computer connection and expanded IR (InfraRed) capabilities I mentioned above, there are slots for both the SmartMedia and CompactFlash cards. What that means, simply, is that you can print directly from the storage card and you can forget about the computer. There’s a nifty “index mode” that lets you print out thumb-nail images of your collection before you select which images to print at higher resolution. With fast print speeds of up to 15 pages per minute (ppm) in text and 12 ppm in color, the HP Photosmart 1215 Color Printer blows away your old inkjet printer. A mere $399 go to >> HP Photosmart 1215 Color Printer

Nikon's CoolPix 775 >>>>

This week, Nikon also announced two superior digital cameras: Nikon's CoolPix 775 (seen left) and the 995 (shown below). The Nikon's CoolPix 775 features a 3x zoom lens and a 2.14 megapixel CCD. Nikon claims this is the world's lightest digital point-and-shoot camera ever and I'm not going to argue. The camera easily connects to your computer and you simply touch a button to send imagery onto the web. It comes with a great suite of photo manipulation software (all the cameras listed here do, too, by the way) plus an 8 MB Type I CompactFlash™ memory card and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery with charger. Available in stores in July 2001, the Coolpix 775 has an MSRP of $449.95. go to >> Nikon's CoolPix 775