The Zhao Family

It's been an amazing 10 days since our last post and we seem to have lost touch with the rest of the bloggersphere community. Actually there have been several causes to this absence. For one, girls are such more handful than boys that we can only spend more time to love her more than to post anything, secondly with the help of our lovely boys our little camera is seeing the end of the tunnel for its life which has a snowball effect into other things, third we much rather spend time sleeping or resting whenever we get a chance for these are the times when sleep is a hot commodity(most of you understand).

The snowball effect would be our lack of photo posts; which I much rather do than to write long lengthy run-on blog spot about nonsense. But with the slow torture that we've put our little camera through, it has finally given up on us, at least we feel. Through dropping it on concrete, spilling liquids, breaking doors for the battery, jamming the lens while opening, cracking the screen, and many other abuses we're very surprised the camera has lasted this long and took so many wonderful pictures throughout the years. I mean by all means it still takes wonderful pictures, when it works, but now it has a personality of its own. It won't focus, the battery can only take like 20 photos, and I personally feel that it has had enough of us. The snowball effect continues since the small camera don't work, Abbey dont' know how to use the big camera to take photos nor record videos and I am not home to take them, and when I am home it's dark or the kids are asleep, so pictures have not been taken. On top of that, our last 3 weekends have been just going here and there all over town to birthday parties. As much fun as they are, after getting home, we are just exhausted to do anything. And with that, the last couple weeks Cayleigh has had growth spurts where she'll eat and cry and eat more so often that it tires me out too. She also went through a period of baby acne so you didn't miss out much on posting. The next few weeks should be better.

Okay now onto better and more important news. I need all of your input as to which point and shoot to buy. I would like everyone who read our blog to input their 2 cents. I've read all kinds of reviews from all over and they vary so much that I've given up. First here's my 2 cents. We've used the Nikon Coolpix 5900 for years and it was like the best PS we've used b/c the pictures were pretty good white balanced, when flashed is used indoors the people skin color were quite good and not off tone/saturated/yellowish, it has zoom video recording, and focused fairly quick. We're looking into replaced our 5900. Abbey will use it mainly for our kids, so skin tones are important along with good video quality. Needs to be as simple as possible. Budget to be around $200. Here's a couple things I have against some major brands:Canon-when flash is used-skin tones are very yellows, Sony-proprietary memory cards, Nikon-optics aren't as good as older models, Casio-slow focus, and Kodak-color tinting/focus. Tell us what PS you're using and what you like and dislike about your camera and what you would recommend if you were to buy a camera soon. And any sales/good deals going on as of 3/16/09. (Please look for quality of photo and not megapixel of the camera; MP not a big deal since I only print about 1% or less of all my photos and I rather keep the MP down so it wont' kill all my storage and upload speed)

Hope to hear everyone's input!!