Sunday, January 4, 2015

More Smart Stuff.

      About a year ago I bought a new car and posted about all the smart stuff in it. There are many sensors which tell you many things. It tells me when tire pressures are low and much more.

     I was talking to a friend the other day and his car has more stuff. The lights turn on when needed. When backing up there's a beeper which increases speeds the closer you get and a continuous beep when you are a foot away. The friend rented a car at an airport. He soon came to a 10 km long tunnel. He wondered why he had no lights. It took a sec before he realized that in the car he rented, you had to turn on the lights yourself. Then he had fun finding a light switch.

    So if that wasn't enough I bought a new camera and discovered it can do almost everything but talk. I did my homework in choosing a camera. I wanted some zoom and pixels. I wanted a camera with a handle as I find the little guys hard to hang on to. So I chose a nikon l 830 for about $200.00. I give you this information so that you can get some idea of what cameras do. My old camera was a photo smart M447 put out by Hewlett Packard.

The silver oldie

My challenge

    Now one thing I didn't check was the camera manual. I downloaded all 204 pages. I wish I'd looked at the manual before buying. I might have had a more exact idea of what I was buying. The little manual that comes with the camera is 43 pages. For both of them the diagrams are far too small and sometimes interfere with understanding.

    Now as I got reading and finding out how the camera works , I found more and more that it does many things automatically. Here comes the smart stuff again. There are various modes for shooting. Point the camera at something and it automatically changes to that mode. Point to a person and portrait is seen. Point to a outdoor scene and landscape comes up. Now it took me a little while to discover this feature. All this information comes up on your screen. You can set this camera to do things manually. I'll probably use easy auto most of the time.

    It's amazing what technology has devised. It's certainly a lot smarter than I am.

    I've had fun playing with this camera even though I haven't saved one picture. I want to know a few things before I get many miles away from the 204 page manual when I run into a problem..