Grandma's Camera

It is no sin to get older and to have grandchildren. Nor is it wrong to want to have thousands of pictures of them plastered over the house and the internet. It is, however, a dreadful and terrible thing to make those pictures look bad. Nowadays there is no excuse for the out-of-focus image with heads lopped off and the colour gone to mud. Modern cameras can do better than that...

But we older folk sometimes are not entirely up to the minute with the latest technology in cameras. We remember film and the simple camera that coped with outdoor pictures - the family gathered on the front lawn or at the dinner table. We pointed, shot, and let the chemist deal with the rest of the problems. The resultant prints went into albums and on the refrigerator and we were happy.

Well, take the chemist out of the equation - Heaven knows that we'll be seeing enough of them with our swollen, itchy, or leaky bits...we don't need them to be the arbiters of our images as well.

The camera that does it automatically, easily, and with clarity is the thing we need. If there are only one or two buttons to press, all the better - but we must have clean files on our computers or to give to the mall printer so that the grandies look like we think they look. Olympus has one of these that is perfect for us.

The Stylus SH 50 is small enough to be convenient but big enough to be easily grasped. It is precise and fast - press the button and it does the business right then. There is a long zoom lens in case the grandies are at the beach and a wide-angle lens in case we are on holiday  and get to the big scenic lookout. There is a flash that lets us take indoor images perfectly.

It does do video - just point and shoot. The video has good clear sound - in stereo. And it has a priceless asset - there is a shake-reduction device  it that operates no mater how we hold it - if we have a bit of a tremor it does not matter - the camera will smooth it out.

Best of all - it is on special now until Christmas at Camera Electronic for $ 314 complete. Just add a memory card and start shooting.