Problem is I can’t afford one. Neither can a lot of people. I blew my gadget budget a year ago when I bought last year’s model of the same camera. My credit cards can’t take this abuse. Not while banks are getting wiped out. My friends are losing their jobs. Etc.

This is one reason why I like covering web stuff. For the most part the cool new things, like Fotonauts, a cool new photo sharing site, on the Web are free. Or pretty low cost.

But damn, look at that video. Slobber. Slobber. Slobber. Oh, sorry.

I think this is what’s wrong with our country. We get lust for new toys, or things we can’t afford, and decide to put them on our credit cards and we all get into trouble. I’m not going to do that this time. Sorry, Canon. We’ll have to earn this the old fashioned way: save, save, save.

You can visit my Flickr account to see which camera made which images and you’ll see some other comparison photos and other images that I’ve made with the Nokia N82. Make sure you click on the “All Sizes” option to see the full resolution images to really compare.

Yes, if you look closely the images made with the pro SLR are nicer, but that isn’t the point. The point is that photos made with cell phones are getting to be darn good. The worst photo you’ll ever take is the one you don’t take because you didn’t have your camera with you. I don’t know about you, but only photo geeks like Thomas Hawk take their pro cameras everywhere (he shoots with a Canon 5D). I know I carry my cell phone everywhere, but only have my 5D a small percentage of the time, so I’m far more likely to get a shot of something interesting with my cell phone. Speaking of Thomas, he wrote two great posts yesterday. First is on the 10 things he learned from Ansel Adams. The second is about 12 ways to never miss a photo opportunity.

How does the N82 compare to the older N95? The camera is better and I like the phone overall better with one glaring problem: it doesn’t work with AT&T’s 3G network, so doing video on Qik on the N82 isn’t nearly as nice.