New digital camera

Before I tell you about our new digital camera, I want to say that Margi is coming back soon from her working holiday in Canada. She'll also visit London for a few days on her way back. I'm quite jealous.

Back to the topic at hand. Last weekend we bought a Panasonic DMC-FZ5 digital camera. It has the following features:

• 5 Megapixel resolution.
  
• 12x optical and 4x digital zoom, yeah that is right 12x optical! I can zoom into your nose and count your nose hair, but that is disgusting so I won't.
  
• Leica lens. I'm not an expert on these things, but the clever people here at work say its a damn good lens.
  
• Optical image stabiliser (sits in the lens it seems). This is especially useful when using the full 12x zoom without a tripod.
• 320x240 video recording at 30 fps.
  
• Playback directly from the camera to the TV.
• USB connection to PC.

Ok, this is the stuff that we mere mortal will understand. Then there is all the other neat things that you can go check out on the website.

To test the camera we went to Spier wine estate near Stellenbosch for a picnic. At Spier there is a hotel, spa, restaurants, deli, conference facilities, amphitheater, horse, ponies, birds of pray and cheetahs! The cheetahs there are part of the Cheetah Outreach program. There are a number of adult cheetahs and currently eight 4 month old cheetahs. They are very cute and playful, wish I had one! Needless to say, we took a lot of pictures at Spier.

After Spier we drove around the False Bay coast (east side only) and took some pictures of the surfers, mountains and beaches. Got some nice action photos of the surfer dudes.

After that we went home and checked the pictures on our TV and then downloaded it to the PC and checked it there again. As you can probably deduce, we like looking at photos :)