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To: Art Bechhoefer who wrote (6699)	8/22/1999 9:08:00 PM
From: Ausdauer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

Thread (and especially Art), Some reflections from my recent trip. First to Art B ====> I trust you are enjoying your Nikon. Thanks for the photo. I just downloaded it tonite after trucking 22 rolls of exposed film to the local film developer. It will cost me about $220.00 to get it developed and I paid another $60.00 in film costs, so this habit ain't cheap. Kind of wish I had purchased a high res digital camera before I left on vacation. I spent about 10 days in Sweden with my in-laws and another 10 days in the Tirol (Austrian Alps) with my wife, two kids and a station wagon. It is easy to go through a roll of film in the picturesque setting of the Alps. I noted a couple things in travelling. The Swede's I spoke to find digital cameras much too expensive. The local store called "Expert", which I later realized was a major EU retail outlet, carried about a dozen digital cameras. I didn't see much in the way of CF cards visibly displayed. Fuji and Olympus have a huge exposure in Sweden and the rest of Europe. Kodak is relatively difficult to find. On the street I saw about 4 people with digital cameras. A Nikon Coolpix 900, a high resolution Mavica, a low resolution Fuji (1024 x 768) and a Canon Powershot. I never realized that videocameras are the device of choice for capturing "memories". They seemed several fold more common than cameras, although most people presumably carried both. The photography chains in Austria had very few digital cameras on display. One major chain had only a Fuji MX2700 on sale for 9,900ATS, or about $750.00. In Germany I found a Nikon Coolpix 950 on sale at a camera boutique for 1800 DM (or about $1,000.00) compared to over 2000 DM at the Frankfurt airport. The airport was also selling 64 MB Lexar cards for 649 DM (ridiculous) and a 32 MB SmartMedia card (labelled Olympus) for 329 DM (equally ridiculous). My wife also has a couple of cousins who are college age. MP3 is gigantic on the college campus where they have very high speed internet connections and can download a song in a matter of seconds. Plenty of titles to be found on the internet. They also hook the audio directly up to their stereo system so the sound was great. Essentially indistinguishable from a CD. I am looking for camera prices to tumble over the next few months. I am really itching to get a new multimegapixel SLR. Ausdauer