Originally Posted by
Piper.Classique
You dont have to go to London to find a good camera shop. I suggest you contact a nearby photographer or club and ask for a recommendation. .
You don't need to set the colour temperature in the camera, it's very easy to do in post processing. You can leave it on auto and fiddle around with it later. As I and others have suggested, you do need to try actual cameras in an actual shop. I would like to add, when you have found the camera of your dreams in a shop, buy it from the shop. That way they can stay in business, rather than using their expertise and then buying on eBay.
Thanks for your advice. London is only one hour and six minutes away by train when I'm in the UK, and the verdant Lincolnshire countryside I live in (within walking distance of a railway station) doesn't really have shops, let alone camera shops. I'll go to London.
Most of the big London shops also have ebay sites, suggesting they have already adjusted their prices to ebay shoppers. I would have no problem buying second-hand from a camera shop that offered a warranty, whereas I would be reluctant to buy anything except brand-new from ebay, you never know when a dealer is going to shut up shop. BonnieLass has suggested second hand, although her suggestion wasn't a shirt-pocket camera (to be fair to her, I hadn't specified this as a desideratum at the time) and I'm seriously considering this now, from a reputable shop.
In other news, I've got my scanner to talk to my Linux computer, a victory of perseverance over common sense, 1990s scanners were never meant to talk to 21st century operating systems. I have some aviation pix from the 1980s taken with my Olympus XA that might be worth putting up in the thread 'Pix', which has scrolled off the front page, to my regret, I really enjoyed seeing other peoples' pix. Most of my pix were taken with Kodachrome 100 film, I also took a lot with Ektachrome 40 (I think) slide film, but these usually weren't of aviation subjects.
My hand is steady enough that I can take long exposures, one of the features I like of the long obsolete Fuji MX-2900 zoom that I still have is the ability to take long exposures aloft, using my body as the stabilising platform when the aircraft is moving due to turbulence. The reason why the MX2900 is obsolete is that it only has 16 MB of memory, even with an external SD card, whereas what I want to do is film video.