HP has new toys!

This post is sponsored by HP, and that's pretty darned cool.

I want my HP, I want my HP, I want my money for nothing and my chicks for free. I want one of these cool digital cameras that HP is giving away to bloggers, not for myself, no...

I want one because , aside from the fact that digital photography is cool, once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a fellow blogger's camera got dropped into a glass of beer, and I think she needs a new one. Now, I just got a 6MP digital camera a few months ago, and you can go to Flickr and see the shots I took of the WPBT winter classic.

Now there are lots of deals out there on digital photography, and I actually just helped my sister buy one for my niece for Christmas, so I did a pile of research on them. I figured out that for my use, I need at least a 5MP, because every once in a while I want to print pictures. It's rare, since so much stuff is done on the web and through services like Flickr, but it happens. A 5MP camera lets you print clearly up to 8x10, and even larger if you get a great shot just right.

I picked out a 4MP camera for Stephanie, because she's not going to do much large-format printing, and needs an entry-level camera to start getting the feel of things and take snapshots and stuff like that. I got her a 512MB memory card, but I may have goofed on the batteries. Her camera uses AA rechargeable batteries, as does my older Sony (which I've given to my wife since I got the newer, more compact camera).

While this seems like a great idea, it's actually a bit of a hassle, since you can't just throw regular AA batteries in there and expect them to work for very long. Rechargeable batteries actually have more juice than normal batteries, and digital cameras use a lot of juice. My new camera has a rechargeable battery pack that I'm much happier with. It's also several years newer than my other camera, so is probably more battery-efficient as well.

So that's just something to think about when you're picking out a digital camera, or looking to get into digital photography. This post has been sponsored by HP through Pay Per Post.