I was buying myself a new camera from Amazon and tossed in a Havoc Heli for the fun of it. It was only $24 at Amazon, although Target sometimes has them as low as $15.  Pretty cool little gadget. The cats go bonkers over it.

 

As for the camera? It make take a bit to get used to. It does do very wide angles and the steady shot feature is nice. I need to pick up an SD card because the internal memory will only hold about 6 pics. Here are a couple of quick shots of my cat.

Note the noise. This is with the camera on the full auto setting and using ambient light in my living room. I’m pretty happy with the white balance (usually incandescent lighting leaves a yellowish tone), but the noise is pretty extensive in low light. I haven’t had a chance to use it outside yet. I was about to go big and get a full DLSR, but it was running close to $900. This Lumix is a “bridge” DSLR (meaning halfway between a point and shoot and a full DLSR). For under $300, I figured I’d relearn to shoot (used to own high end film SLRs) in digital mode and when I get the hang of it, move to a DLSR. By then the 10+ megapixel cameras should be coming down in price.