Woohoo.... A few dollars less and...

When a Nikon 1 J1 with 10-30 or preferably a plain 10mm lens is under $100 secondhand, I might leap on one!

The MSRP of this was $649 when it came out in September of 2011. You can almost hear modern cameras depreciating! In fact, they depreciate so rapidly that I really cannot understand, knowing this, why people buy new, I'll never understand - especially when just about any digital camera made in the last 10 years is more than up to the task for most things.

My interest in smaller, lighter cameras is purely for convenience. I don't need ultimate image quality. It's not as though some mystical figure will appear, decide they want to buy one of my photos then turn their nose up because its not 50 megapixels. I'm not laboring under the delusion that photography is about anything more than a photograph and am well aware peoples interest in photos is pretty negligible these days. I see the photo blogger Ken Rockwell said Since photos are disposable today, people take them much less seriously, and ultimately will ignore them entirely. Stop to smile for a photo? People are too busy updating their Facebook page to stop for more than a half a moment to put any effort into smiling

With other people's lack of interest in photography, I have only myself to please. It's like a fellow in my camera club who made the observation that whatever camera he used didn't matter because it was only ever printed to 10x8 or viewed on a screen. Similarly, he said he had only himself to please.

Whether the Nikon 1 will replace my DSLR is a total unknown. I'd like to have an equally capable but smaller, lighter and less nickable system. The technical specifications are very impressive!

In terms of image quality, I'm not yet sure how it stacks up alongside my 30D. The lenses though seem quite excellent for range. There's a 10-30 which is pretty much a bland 28-85. That's the kind of lens that leaves me feeling a bit underwhelmed. There's a 30-110 that complements it, giving effectively 85-300mm. Personally, I find 300 to be a shade on the short side but it works.

The more interesting lens is a 10mm f2.8 that seems ideally suited to landscape and starfield photography. There are others but they're of little appeal. The 10-30 set midway would be excellent for high speed photography, should I get back into that. Indeed, the smaller sensor would vastly improve depth of field, giving me at 1 meter and f8, 1.25 feet of sharp subject. Way more than the measly 4 inches on my Canon system.

Of course, a J1 with a Vela 1 (if it ever changes status from vaporware) would be the perfect high speed photography setup. The big bonus - everything is so cheap, it doesn't matter if it gets destroyed doing high speed photography.

I might get a J1 in the new year, if it drops below $100 and then if it compares favorably to my Canon kit, I might sell the big stuff. I know the kind of photography I do and the kind I like to do. It's not a huge loss if it's just a bum buy either. From what I've seen, the images have a dreamy quality that I quite like.