I love my new Canon 350D. It's the first SLR I've owned, and the pictures are automatically 10x better than my little Canon Elph S400. It's the only time in my life where spending money made me a better artist.

But inexpensive digital SLRs don't shoot a full 35mm frame. Instead they have smaller sensors. The 350D has a "1.6x crop factor", which basically means your pictures look OK but your lenses are more telephoto than you'd think. A 35mm lens acts like a 56mm lens. If you want a wide angle 28mm shot you have to buy a 17mm lens. Really wide angle lenses for these small sensor cameras are very dear.

Canon has tried to turn this liability into an advantage by selling "EF-S" lenses, special lenses that only work on small sensor cameras. They go deeper into the camera body, and in theory allow for cheaper / lighter lenses. All I know is they don't work on all cameras, just these small sensor ones.

And while right now most digital SLRs are small sensor, there's reason to think that Canon may soon switch to all full size sensors. The newly announced full sensor Canon 5D is a bellweather here. At $3300 it's a lot more than the $800 for a 350D, but a lot cheaper than the $7600 that the current cheapest full sensor camera costs. Folks seem to be excited by the 5D full frame. Wide angles that work like wide angles, better viewfinder, what's not to like?

All of this is a long-winded way of suggesting that EF-S lenses may not be such a good investment, that in four years you may not be able to buy a good camera that uses them. Which is sort of an awkward position for Canon. They've made some serious EF-S lenses, will they abandon their customers?

My camera doesn't have raw output, but it does have three JPG quality settings. I just tested empirically to see how they correspond to the JPEG Q parameter:

Setting	Size	jpg Q
Superfine	1824k	98
Fine	1148k	94
Normal	580k	81

Given that quality of 75 is considered adequate in most JPEG software, there's some comfortable headroom here. Fine's 94 quality seems plenty for the photos to me and saves almost half the space. Then again with 1 gig of Compactflash for $83, there's not much need to economize storage. Bandwidth is still expensive, I'll have to remember to recompress the images before uploading to Flickr.

I've had my new digital camera, a Canon Elph S400, for a week or so now. I'm really impressed with it, particularly the quality of the colour even on full automatic settings.

I've had a lot of fun with the macro setting. Cliche flower photos, but they're fun to do.

I just bought myself a new tiny digital camera, the Canon Elph S400. So far so good. 4 megapixels is nice and the user interface has improved noticably over the old S200 I'd used before.

The feature that surprises me the most for being useful is the TV playback mode. Very comfortable looking at photos on a TV screen, and handy in a hotel room.

Trying to find an honest online camera store that will ship quickly and reliably is unnecessarily difficult. I ended up at B&H for rapid shipping. Amazon has it for $480 via J&R.