Brand loyalty is dead

My first car, the first one I called mine because I purchased it and chose what I purchased, was a Honda. In particular, it was a Honda CRX. When Kris and I went to buy a new car, by process of elimination, we ended up with another Honda for me. Four years later when he decided it was time for a new, greener car for his long commute to work, he opted for a Honda hybrid, and we had our third Honda

Basically, for a decade and a half, I've been driving Hondas.

The newest car isn't a Honda, however. It's an Audi. To me, Audis are the Big Red Roller Skate™, the car my mom had when I was very young. It didn't work exactly well all the time, and, well, sometimes had to be pushed, hence its nickname.

However, when Katie asked me if wanted to buy her car, and I said yes, well, it was only fate. I mean, the license plate matches my address, how could I ever say no to that little coincidence? Clearly fate.

Well, fate, and a very generous Katie.

Not buying a Honda was almost as hard as buying another car before the previous one had been driven into the ground. The CRX had over 200k miles on it and still drove me from point A to point B, albeit not necessarily as safely as the next car did or the new car does, but that part wasn't as much of a concern for me as being as cheap with cars as possible.

However, the purchase made me realize there are other options out there, other than what my favorite brand offers. When I was looking for my next digital camera, my current one having taken over 15000 pictures, at least two dozen drops, a few trips around the world, four Nationals tournaments, several weddings including our own, I immediately look at Sony cameras. I've had incredibly good luck with the DSC-P10, but it doesn't focus as well as it used to, and well, it was time to look for a new one (mostly because it'll take me a year or so to find one I really want).

I mentioned this to Eric and Mom, and immediately Eric recommended I purchase a Canon. The Sony they have focuses slowly and, well, echoing my complaint, uses proprietary memory formats. You have to buy a Memory Pro stick, you can't use an SD card. So, economics shows it'll be more expensive for extra memory. Bah.

Eric showed me some pictures, and, wow, they were amazing. Their new Canon camera runs off standard AAA batteries, which he bought high-quality, recharable batteries for, so its big. The pictures it took, however, were amazing. It took some fantastic close up pictures. Since I take a lot of close up pictures for work I do with buttons and beads, the close up quality was the deal maker.

I now have a new Canon camera. So far, it's pretty awesome. It doesn't have a view finder, so I'll need to learn how to use it when I want to maximize the battery time (or buy a bunch of extra batteries), but I think I'll manage.

Now, if I can just get it to wirelessly offload pictures via bluetooth onto my computer, which automatically uploads them to my website, I'll be all set.

Oh wait, that's my camera phone which already does that.

Maybe via wi-fi?

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