Contact lenses are much abused eye products and can actually cause damage if not picked wisely. Here are a few reasons why contact lenses should be picked wisely after a prescription and that too after a visit to a qualified eye specialist. To begin with, a contact lens need not be 'fits-all' type. One must get it prescribed. Since a prescription is an authorized statement that clearly mentions what is ok, you can shop with confidence and it feels good that you are doing the right thing. Since buying a pair of contact lens can happen only through a prescription, any website selling 'branded' contact lens are likely to be selling lens that may not be branded and that isn't good news for your eye. If you have been wearing both glasses and contact lens, you are now aware that the prescriptions are a little different from each other. While most of us know what we need a prescription to buy glasses for eye sight problems, the same prescription cannot be used for contact lenses. This means, you need to get a separate prescription for contact lens. Even if you wish to wear contact lens for changing your eye color, you will need a prescription from an Opthalmogist. If you prefer to wear a specific type of contact lens, you can talk to your doctor so that she or he can recommend and also mention that brand in the prescription so that there are no hassles tomorrow. The doctor can also clear any doubt and specify the positives and negatives about any special type of Contact Lens. A prescription will have the doctor's contact details and this way, the dealer can call and check should there be any kind of confusion or if any clarification needs to be sought. Here is a link that might be useful: Contact Lenses

Hi Susan, more help than you can imagine. It all is coming together, I am starting to visualize--and looking for my credit card. Your response about burning cd by going to Walmart or similar is priceless--that's me, overanalyze, make the direct complex. I do miss my 35mm and lenses and medium format cameras. With a career as archaeologist/preservationist, I created hundreds of b+w images that worked fine, from holes in the ground (contrast problems) to hulking buildings. Frame, focus, shoot, bracket, shoot, pray, bring to photoshop. Youth, familiarity with the tool, simple support system was nice. I have hundreds of medium to large format b+w negatives related to my study property: 1920s to 1949. Fairchild camera aerial views, on and on. Getting prints has been a nightmare--I'm doing a few with an on-line service and have promise of prints, digitizing, etc as student project at local community college in the fall--great but too late for my schedule. I could chip in on your post with some stories. Best tho, I checked out the scanner you mentioned. It will do up to 8.5x11, film, wow? And the price is great--I bought half of it with on-line scanning order. Your images a beautiful, just the quality I hope for with my larger negatives. The photographer was good too. I certainly will keep you posted as I learn and get about my work. Help from all corners is wonderful. Winner? Go to Walmart! BTW, I am upstate NY native, the region was my primary research focus for several years. Mike

Rather than give you a specific make & model recommendation I would rather give you some general information that will help you make the descision as to which camera is best for you. On first inspection all digital cameras, whether they are simple point & shoot or high end professional DSLR's are a bit intimidating because they have all sorts of buttons and drop down menus. DO NOT LET THAT SCARE YOU. All digital cameras, regardless of how big or small have a fully automated mode where you can use it as a point & shoot camera and get perfect results from your first shot and you may be happy using it in that mode for the rest of your life, but I must warn you ahead of time, digital photography is addictive. Once you start getting great point & shoot type pics you will no doubt get curious about what else you can do, from extreme closeups in your flower garden to shooting a bird a 100ft away. And what parent or grandparent doesn't want a few action photos of their little darlings participating in organized sports and such? The point is, you want a camera that won't break the bank to purchase and is ready to go right out of the box, but one that can grow with you as your skills and knowledge improves. Back in the days of film you had two choices, you could get a point & shoot and live with its limitations or you could buy an SLR and had to enter a formal study group to learn how to use it, but such is not the case today. They do still make Point & shoot cameras which typically sell in the $60 to $150 price range, but I would not recommend those. Most of the new point and shoot cameras do not have an optical viewfinder (an eyepiece you look through). Instead, they use what is called "Live view" where the picture is displayed on the lcd screen on the back of the camera. In some circumstances Live view is highly desirable, but live view requires a lot of energy, which dramatically shortens your battery life, and it can be very difficult to see when outdoors in bright sunlight. In addition, most point & shoot cameras have a fixed focal length lens or one that perhaps offers 2x or 3x telephoto, and some offer an additional 2x digital telephoto, but that is only a process where the camera crops your image down. The problem with the digital tele is that as it crops the image down, it is reducing your negative size, which then dramatically reduces the size of quality prints you can expect to get. You could step up to an entry level DSLR but even the basic entry level DSLR's start out at around $500 plus the cost of a lens and they are generally much to bulky for those who want a point & shoot. Fortunaely they make what is known in the industry as "Bridge Cameras" because they bridge the gap between the el cheapo point & shoot and the expensive DSLR. Bridge cameras will generally average about $200 and upwards to $400 but when you see what you get, they are without question one of the best bargains in the industry. Bridge cameras will operate in simple point & shoot mode, requiring no technical skills from the operator, but they also have the full range of shutter speed and exposure controls that are found on the professional DSLR's. Now, while the bridge cameras do have a fixed lens instead of interchangable lenses, they offer some fantastic zoom capabilities on the lenses they have. They will generally all have zoom lens that ranges from wide angle to 6x or 8x and some even have zooms that go as high as 15x or more. The bridge cameras have an optical viewfinder which means when you look in the eyepiece you are actually looking through the camera lens and you are seeing what the camera sees so you need not worry about chopping heads and feet off and some even offer the live view as an option for shooting in dim light or framing a closeup. And while on the subject of closeups, most of the bridge camera lenses also have the macro feature so you can shoot extreme closeups. You mentioned that you want to be able to put your photos on a flash drive. Nearly all digital cameras use SD or SDHC cards for memory. The actual number of photos that you can fit on a card depends upon the size of the card and the size of the files that are created by your camera, but to give you an example, I shoot a Pentax K10d DSLR and when I use an 8gb SDHC card and shoot in the highest quality JPEG mode, I can get 1615 photos on a card, but then I never go in the field with just one card either. I carry four or five spare cards and a minimum of 3 spare Lithium batteries and I can get 700 shots per battery. If I am going for a weekend I also carry my battery charger for the car. To upload your photos to the computer all the cameras have an umbilical cord that plugs into a USB port, but I find it just as easy to pull the memory card and plug that directly into the computer card reader. In a Windows operating system when you plug the card into the computer and box comes up and says it found a memory device and asks you what you want to do, Hit "import photos" and it will automatically upload the photos into "My Photos" on the computer. I then put the card back in the camera and use the camera to format the card, which erases it so I can start over. (You can also pull the card and insert it into one of the photo kiosk machines at your local photo center to select what you want printed.) One thing I would caution you. When you are selecting your new camera find out what type and size of battery it uses. Some of the smaller cameras use a special battery that is designed specific to that camera. If that is the case, you may have difficulty in finding a spare battery, especially in the future. I learned the hard way because I have an older HP point & shoot that has a battery that will no longer hold a charge, but they have discontinued production of that battery. Many of the point & shoot and bridge cameras use AA batteries, which means it is very easy to find replacements and even the rechargeables are not expensive. (I would strongly advise you be sure to get rechargable batteries). If the camera you select uses a proprietary battery find out if that battery is used in other cameras or by other camera manufacturers. If it is in common use by many cameras the odds of it being discontinued any time soon are greatly reduced. Also, if the camera uses a lithium ion battery that is an advantage because Li-on batteries provide much greater power than ni-cads or Nickle-metal halides. When you get your new camera generally they include a simple photo editing program with the camera software disc but I would suggest you also download a free photo editing program from Google, called "Photoscape". Photoscape is a very powerful, yet very user friendly program that is totally free. No spam, no spyware, and none of that 60 day trial nonesense. I have three professional photo editing programs but I find that Photoscape is my basic go to program for all but the most demanding edits. Here is an illustration I made that will give you examples of the different types of cameras...

Yvonne, that's difference you see is caused by my manipulation of a camera in Aperture Priority mode. Picture was taken with Minolta A1, which you can buy now for AUD $500-700. When shooting in Aperture Priority, and I want blurry background, I select widest possible aperture for the shot (f/2.8), and that gives me that beautiful blurry background (out of focus area). Wider the aperture, less background is in focus. All the same, if I want more of the background in focus (for landscape photography, for example), I'll rather select smaller aperture (f/11 or f/22) so almost whole scene, both foreground and background, will be in perfect focus. I believe Sandie can do the same. I suppose Panasonic Lumix supports Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and Full Manual modes. In any case, I strongly recommend anyone to get a camera that has all those shooting modes. -Tom