DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I wish I’d taken a photo of the image that inspired the title of this story: the UPS guy walking down the driveway with a stack of boxes from Amazon.com in his arms. Brown truck, brown shirt, brown pants, brown boxes.

He was carrying our Christmas gifts: some fancy crystal wine glasses and a new digital camera.

The wine glasses don’t really go with our recycled-glass tumblers, but you have to like the thin rims and the pure, high-pitched sound that resonates for 5 seconds when you clink them together. Also, they were half-price (and still are).

The more exciting gift was packed in the smaller two boxes. After three evenings’ worth of poring over reviews and sample images, we decided on the Canon SD450, an “ultracompact” model that is about a quarter the size of my Nikon Coolpix 995. I debated at length whether to get a more feature-rich model like the Powershot S80, which has a wider-angle lens (28mm), semi-manual controls (apeture or shutter priority), and an interface that seemed more intuitive. But it’s bigger all around and weighs twice as much as the SD450, and in the end we decided to get something really small (assuming the image quality would be good, which in this case appears to be true).

After that, we did another iteration of research to see if we could get a tiny camera with a fold-out LCD. I made an inventory of all the available cameras with that feature, and slowly eliminated every one of them: they’re all too big, or flawed in some other way. The SD450 is about the size of a deck of cards, small enough to carry around in a pocket.

(The third box from Amazon contained a spare battery. Why did they ship it separately? That makes as little sense as, well, not having a second battery for a digital camera. But then, I’m all about backups.)