February 19, 2003 Today I decided to buy myself an AIPTEK Pencam 1.3 SD to play with. Since it seems I'll be hitting the road soon and will no longer have access to a digital camera I thought I should get myself one for the road...God forbid I have to shoot film! I always get excited when I get a new toy so of course I took it out of the box and shot a picture as soon as I got to the car(the ONE you see below). Unfortunately that would be the only picture this particular camera will ever take. I got home with it and loaded up the software, conected the camera and downloaded my picture. I was VERY excited...this little teeny, plastic toy feeling camera had taken a nice, big(1280x960), well exposed, sharp and amzingly well saturated picture...even if it was just the front of CompUSA. After that I decided it was time to see what it could really do. I wanted to try out the macro and video modes and see how well it handled different lighting conditions. When I unplugged it and tried to turn it on nothing happened. I kept fiddling with it and tried reading the directions very slowly 3 different times for fear I was missing the simple answer. Nothing worked! I couldn't get the thing to turn on. It even started beeping at me at one point...the manual says NOTHING at all about beeping. So I plugged it back into my laptop to see if there was some option in the software I screwed up. Turns out I had been taking pictures up my nose the whole time I was trying to figure it out. The camera was on the whole time! It's just that the little LCD panel on the back isn't working so you can't tell what you're doing.
Keep your fingers crossed for me for a smooth exchange tomorrow.