I got a new camera today. My old one, a Canon PowerShot A95, had been giving me trouble for about a month now, often times not responding properly, and it finally stopped working completely a couple of days ago — the real sad thing is that I only realized it as I was being given a tour of Swatch Group Japan’s Nicolas G. Hayek Center in Ginza by one of the architects who contributed to the project, Keiji Ashizawa, including views from the top.

After doing some research, I settled on the new Canon IXY Digital 810 IS (the Japanese version of the Canon PowerShot SD850 IS). For a while I’d been thinking that my next camera would be a Lumix, especially for the Leica lens, but the Canon I ended up getting kept showing up highly recommended on review sites, and it seemed to offer all of the features I wanted. When I last bought a camera, I wanted something that offered a lot of manual functionality, but over the 2 and half years that I used the A95, I noticed that I pretty much never used the aperture or shutter speed controls. The only thing I’m really going to miss from my A95 was the LCD that you could flip open, which is how I always took shots. Surprisingly, Canon has eliminated that feature from the entire PowerShot line (only some of the more expensive prosumer models have it).

One of the nicest surprises is that this new camera can act as a great voice recorder, with no limit on length (just the size of your memory card). I tested it quickly, and it’s so much better than what I experienced with the iPod and iTalk combo, which means I might just start doing some Tokyo Boy podcasts again.

Another great feature I’ve been having a lot of fun with is the photostitch mode. What you see at the top of this post, a section of Kanda River, can be better viewed here.