Flickr: The ultimate camera quality tester.

I'm always forgetting about this, since before this week I'd never owned a camera that could take advantage of this -- but it turns out that more and more modern ones are now embedding information about themselves as metadata within digital photos, in a way so that a service like Flickr can scan an uploaded photo and tell automatically what kind of camera was used to shoot it. Whenever Flickr determines this, in fact, it runs a mention of the camera brand in the lower-right corner of the webpage; and if you click on it, it will take you over to a centralized page at Flickr concerning just that camera itself.

The page is cool enough just for the interesting statistics it presents -- how many fellow Flickr members own that camera, how many photos from that camera brand were uploaded yesterday, how fast new people are buying that particular camera -- and of course it's very smart of the Yahoo-owned Flickr to link on each page to the section at Yahoo Shopping where a person can actually buy the camera, as well as read consumer-style reviews. But here's the deal-maker, and why it makes so much sense to go automatically to Flickr anymore when wanting to know more about a particular camera; on the same page, they also display a good 10 or 20 thumbnails of photos taken with that camera, sorted by what other members find to be the most interesting images in the system. And this is just so much better a way to instantly and profoundly understand what you think of that camera, and whether or not you should buy it -- by simply getting a broad cross-sample of actual images shot with that camera, from a variety of people with different skill levels, just about the only really important aspect of a digital camera altogether. Believe it or not, for example, all five photos shown above were taken with the exact same Nikon Coolpix S550 I now own (shot respectively by Flickr members sefosse in Italy, NANIPOLLITO in Spain, rumble maso in Italy, cocoi m in California, and .stephen. in Canada); and that means that I too now have the theoretical opportunity to shoot photos just as cool as these, for the first time in my particular life since way back in the early '90s when I was a film-based photography major in college, running around with a Pentax K-1000 and a box full of Ilford Extra Matte.

Anyway, just wanted to point this out, for those who didn't realize this existed at Flickr, and who are currently on the lookout for a new camera themselves. It's a great place to get an instant and powerful look at whatever particular brand you're thinking about getting.