Digital Camera War SD500 and Rebel XTi

Sunday At The Cavitation House: Every Sunday night we usually put a little extra effort into cooking up a good dinner for the famola. This is also where Jen usually pulls out some of her "magazine" recipes in the eternal search for the perfect dish for those special occasions with friends and family. This Sunday was no different. We ended up with honey-apple glazed game hens on a bed of apple wild rice pilaf and a side of Dijon broccoli. Looks yummy but in the end the hens were average from a flavor standpoint/above average from a moistness standpoint, the rice was kind of blah and the broccoli was just downright awful. Imagine that, the broccoli was terrible ;-)

The Ultimate Exersaucer: We have had a few people comment on the new exersaucer which Payton got for Christmas so I figured I would put a link to it here to answer the question of "Where can I get that". To be honest, at first I was a little skeptical of this toy...it just seemed a little odd. In the end, Jen prevailed and we got the replacement. Wow - it is a super cool toy. It is totally inverted from a normal exersaucer seeing as the kiddo cruises around the outside instead of turning in the inside. This is great as it allows Payton to run around in circles vs just standing in place. It also has the added bonus of allowing Kade to push her around in circles at warp speed...something which they both seem to enjoy a great deal ;-) I will upload a video of that sometime as it really is pretty darn funny. In the end I highly recommend the Bright Starts Around We Go Activity Station...a 4 out of 5 stars.

Sonicare Elite 7300: Damned battery stopped charging after just one month...its going back ;-( I guess that lowers the rating from 4/5 to 2/5 stars.

Digital Camera Wars: So I tried to take some quick ultra long distance test shots with my two leading cameras...the Canon SD500 (7MP) and the Canon Digital Rebel XTi (10MP). The subject is Rocky Mountain National Park as taken from my dining room door (~35 miles estimated distance). It was early dawn so the light was still pretty soft...but that was kind of the point. I quickly realized that my approach was significantly flawed as you will see below. The white balance between the two are way different and that really makes a huge difference in the end pictures. So what I did was take three pictures at max zoom (see below) then cropped them to compose roughly the same image. I did save them as JPG but I did do it at the highest resolution to try and preserve as much detail as possible. Click on the images to see the actual results...

1. SD500 at 3X optical (true spec: 37-111 mm)
2. XTi at 55mm (stock lens: 18-55mm)

3. XTi at 300mm (telephoto lens: 75-300mm)

Comparing the three it becomes apparent that the white balance really screwed things up for me. In the end these went down pretty much as per the max zoom capabilities. The SD500 111mm outperformed the 55mm wrt detail and the 300mm kicked everything else's butt...duh. I guess I will have to spend a little more time and think about how to even things out in my next round. In the meantime, here is a sunset pic I captured with my XTi the other evening...at least it appears to capture color pretty darn good...something that my Canon G1 sucked at. Resolution is down-geared to make it 800K vs. 3.2M...but your monitor will likely not know the difference ;-)
G'Night.