alternatives

Whilst keeping my ears open to potential present-suggestions for Nicky's birthday (including one to be proxy-gifted from the wingpiglet) the mention of "Kindle" sometime during the past month had not gone unnoticed, even though I'd already bought her a paper book by that point. Another mention of "a better camera than the one on this phone" cropped up last Wednesday evening; this has come up before and I've noticed her struggling to persuade the camera on the otherwise-inoffensive Desire HD to take pictures before (as I have struggled myself, particularly when attempting to catch something fleeting when the proper camera is not within reach). Perhaps only having a few hours' internet-poking-time to find out what to get (rather than the usual several-hours-several-times-a-week-for-a-month I would usually spend poking at specifications and reviews and so on) is the best way to go about these things. As getting-Nicky-a-camera has cropped up before I was vaguely keeping eyes on things like the LX5s and S95s and G12s of the world so that if the house should acquire a second camera that it would be one I'd be happy to use, which might also be used instead of my propercamera when extra portability or decreased size was critical. There wasn't time to fully reassess such things (and not enough pennies on the piggy this month) but the intersection of the three sets (things-acceptable-by-their-specification (of which some low-light ability was particularly important, given that the wingpiglet spends a lot of time in conditions where apertures greater than f2 and ISOs greater than 1000 are required for properly-exposed non-motion-blurred capture), things-within-budget and things-available-in-physical-shops-in-town) came down to a couple of models, of which one was deemed unsuitable when it wasn't immediately obvious how it worked. The P300 doesn't do RAW and only has S and A rather than full M but was easy to work out how to use from a standing start (albeit with some familiarity with camera menus) and was in stock locally, albeit with a box slightly worn from it being the display model.