Hokkaido trip preperation 3: Camerea

What trip would be complete without a camera to have a record of what you have seen? Especially more so if it is of somewhere where it isn't easy for you to get to enough to have the next time of being there being hard or impossible?

Well, you don't need those expensive cameras, as well as expensive lenses and equipment to go with it, to get a good picture. A normal point an shoot camera will do. I don't recommend ones built into a mobile phone: it lacks a lot of features (though smartphones like iPhones has things like point focus and exposure), memory is shared with everything on your phone (less space for your photos and messy to organise), reduced battery life due to non-camerea related use (not good if you want to take pictures all day), analog zoom, the awkwardness of holding it. More importantly, how long does it take between activating the camera and being able to take a picture? And for phones with touch screen, are you able to take a picture without looking out for that capture button on the screen?

I have grew up in an era where the transition from analog to digital happened. I am so glad that there are fewer bad shots and less of that blinding camera flash.

Anyway, I bought this camera a little more than 2 years ago and it came with two 8GB SD cards. I considered that big back then. There was a mention of SDXC (64GB to 2TB) support, but I never thought back then that I would be this close to getting it as it was in the store when I bought the 32GB memory card last week. (On a side note, my Kobo Aura HD I may have mentioned, back in December or January, having a microSD slot that "supports up to 32GB". Guess I can use it there, though 2GB alone is a lot for an ebook.)

The more I use this camera, problems that I did not foresee have come up. Nothing major, but can be fustrating. These include:

• Battery levels not indicating actual levels: I hadn't been paying attention as to if it really does not indicate actual levels, but that is what I felt as I used it. Even more so when charging times is unusually long for a "full" battery. It does, however, really warned me if it is really low.
• Moisture in the camera pouch around the lens in certain situations. I don't know why.
• Corruption of photos: I really did lose 3 days worth of photos. I did try uploading as soon as possible, but I didn't have my laptop with me, there were only two shared computers whose speeds are painfully slow, if not already in use by someone else. Given the situation, I could have lost more photos that were on that memory card. Till today, I have no idea why that happened, but I strongly suspect the memory card reader that I used. Only pictures that I took with the camera phone that day (which was hardly at all) surives.
• 8GB only lasted me halfway through my Kansai trip. Good thing I had the other memory card. Used this experience to prepare the Europe trip a year later by bringing all the memory cards I have (which are mostly 1GB and 2GB micro SD cards from somewhere). Seeing that I've used two, this adds up to about 16GB. Few 720p videos were recorded, but I want to record more footage in 1080p. Storage limitations were a factor of this.
• Adjusting brightness of the screen (not light exposure) is kind of troublesome.
• I don't have a spare battery, so I had to charge the battery at the end of the day regardless of how much I used it to avoid having the battery to run out on me, which was what I did during my Europe trip that, even despite that, with how photo snapping crazy I was, managed to drain to empty despite charging the day before. I know I should get a spare battery, but where? (Saw one on an online shopping site, but I don't know if it is reliable.)

Oh well. At least the problems listed above aren't problems directly relating to the camerea itself. Should order that battery now, knowing how long it could take by the cheapest (and slowest) option.