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what to do when your camera gets lost/stolen... and my time in prague

Unfortunately, I have been a victim of theft or utter carelessness as my camera got lost/stolen between my train ride to Prague and my walk to the hostel. To be honest, I have no idea what happened except I sadly see all of my photos from my last day in Berlin disappear.

I thought about doing complicated schemes and getting a new camera shipped from America to France. Given the amount of time I have left (less than 2.5 weeks) and the amount of trouble that it may cause to get the camera here (customs, turnaround time, etc), I decided to give the camera function on my Motorola A1200 a good test run to see whether I want to use my phone as both a camera and mode of communication. The last time I sneaked a few photos inside a basilica in Paris, 50% of the photos came out okay while the rest were pretty blurry and terrible.

I took most of my photos during the day in various settings. Weather ranged from rainy to sunny weather. I also took photos indoors and outdoors. I took some pictures with people and without people.

There were some limitations with my camera. First of all, 2 megapixels do not compare to 5 megapixels. Also, a tiny mobile phone screen (although it is an LCD screen) does not compare to my 3.1 inch LCD screen of my former camera. It's always nice to be able to quickly judge the quality of the photo on a large screen rather than the miniscule screen of my mobile phone. Some of the settings were really nice such as the low-light setting and zoom. However, the picture becomes very grainy if you zoom really far in. I think this may be fault of the tiny lens. Since there was no flash on my camera phone, I couldn't take many photos in low-light settings.

The good things were that it was nice to be able to set these photos as wallpaper in my phone or a screen saver. In addition, I can instantly send it to my friends back in Paris or in Chicago. As one MMS = 5 SMS, it does not cost that much to send photos via Orange Mobicarte. However, I still prefer to view my photos on a larger computer screen back home and edit them before I emailed them out. It is very convenient that I had a decent camera on my phone with a 1 gig mini SD card. I wish I had image stabilization on my camera thought as I think most photos came out really blurry; however, I can't tell due to the small screen size of my phone.

I walked into a lot of electronics stores in Prague today. The prices here made me appreciate the United States a lot more in terms of affordability and features. I saw the Motorola RIZR retailing for at least 8000 krony ($400) with a contract. Usually most U.S. mobile phone contracts make the phone very inexpensive (besides the upcoming IPhone) in order for the phone to become a hot seller (and more customers as well). I looked at displays of phones, and I see Samsung and Nokia phones prominently displayed right in my eyesight in dead center. Meanwhile, Motorola phones were definitely below my eyesight. Samsung advertising is also plastered everywhere in Prague from the subway stations to media.

As I don't have a USB cable with me, I won't be able to make the final verdict on the image quality of camera phones. I will do this when I get back and upload photos, but I'm sure the quality is inferior. In all likeliness, I will probably buy a new digital camera (sadly on my own money) when I get back to the United States.

posted by Koh @ 12:13 PM