I'm a gadget junkie. No doubt about it. Digital displays fascinated me as a kid, and I still remember staring at the glowing red numerals of an alarm clock, a wrist-watch, etc., just waiting for 5:59 to change to 6. For some reason it was an amazing thing to see those LEDs change from one number to the next.

I loved calculators for the same reason, and soon after getting one, I started memorizing odd multiplication problems (like 81 x 81) because - well - it was just a cool thing to do. (The answer is 6561, by the way, and I actually had to bring up the Window's calculator app to find out. Memory fails me.) The calculator, logically, led to bigger computing devices, and I eventually bought a Commodore 64, then a 128, and later, as I went off to college, an Amiga 500. (Oh, and I nearly forgot that our first video game device was none other than the Atari 2600.) In grad school I got my first PC (a 286 amber-screened monster, just for word processing), a Toshiba 133Mhz PC with a 17" monitor in 1993 for graphics, and then a $150 Librex gray-scaled laptop so I could sit out in the living room and watch Comedy Central on my roommate's 36" TV while I was ostensibly writing my Masters Thesis.

I've gone through numerous computers since graduating from the University of Georgia with an MA in 1998, and since then, it seems, I've either bought or (purchased parts and) built myself a new one every other year. Our household is decadently overrun with laptops -- I'm writing this right now, sitting on the couch, with a 3.5 pound Sony Vaio. My wife has a loaner IBM Thinkpad from UNC's German department, and we have an "old" 8.5 pound Dell paper-weight I bought back in 1999 for $3000 to do graphic design.

This IS leading up to something, as I simply wanted to hammer the point home that I've spent much too much money trying to stay on the affordable cutting edge. My history with digital cameras, however, hasn't been so impulsive. I must have been aware of the first consumer digital camera hitting the markets in 1994 and 1995, but I refrained from buying one (although come to think of it I did buy a SCSI Mustek sanner for $500 in 1994) due to, I'm sure, the exorbidant pricetags.

Yesterday I finally refrained from 10 years of restraint and wrote a sizeable (but reasonable)check to a friend of mine for his Canon d60 Digital SLR. The purchase included a 17-40 mm lens and a grip (which holds an additional battery), and now I feel and look like a professional photographer even though reality says I'm not. The 6.3 megapixel camera is nothing short of incredible, and the simple fact that I will never again take 16 pictures of my cat to rattle off the remaining shots on a roll of film (so it can go to the developer sooner) is well worth the money I spent. That I can use my other three Canon lenses with the D60 is another plus.

This picture, although stolen from the web, looks almost exactly like the equipment I bought:

Now to put it to good use...

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The following is a chunk of text taken from the About pages regarding the digital camera's history.

In August, 1981, Sony released the Sony Mavica electronic still camera, the camera which was the first commercial electronic camera. Images were recorded onto a mini disc and then put into a video reader that was connected to a television monitor or color printer. However, the early Mavica cannot be considered a true digital camera even though it started the digital camera revolution. It was a video camera that took video freeze-frames.

Since the mid-1970s, Kodak has invented several solid-state image sensors that "converted light to digital pictures" for professional and home consumer use. In 1986, Kodak scientists invented the world's first megapixel sensor, capable of recording 1.4 million pixels that could produce a 5x7-inch digital photo-quality print. In 1987, Kodak released seven products for recording, storing, manipulating, transmitting and printing electronic still video images. In 1990, Kodak developed the Photo CD system and proposed "the first worldwide standard for defining color in the digital environment of computers and computer peripherals." In 1991, Kodak released the first professional digital camera system (DCS), aimed at photojournalists. It was a Nikon F-3 camera equipped by Kodak with a 1.3 megapixel sensor.

The first digital cameras for the consumer-level market that worked with a home computer via a serial cable were the Apple QuickTake 100 camera (February 17 , 1994), the Kodak DC40 camera (March 28, 1995), the Casio QV-11 (with LCD monitor, late 1995), and Sony's Cyber-Shot Digital Still Camera (1996).