London, Through the Eyes of the PowerShot A20

A slightly belated hello from Wales, Letters readers! I’ve actually been in the country for a week and a half now, but I’ve been too busy working on art and story stuff with Caby to put up this post like I wanted. I’ll be here until late August, and the rest of the family is in France right now, so we’re vibing with the guinea pigs.

Since I fly in through Heathrow every time I visit, Caby and I start our visits with a couple days in London, zipping around on the Tube and buying way too much fast food. We’ve been getting more adventurous the more often we do it, and this time, I had a new toy to capture the experience with: a Canon PowerShot A20 circa 2001. This $500 MSRP rebadged Canon IXUS 300 beauty shoots in a max of 1600×1200 and takes CompactFlash cards for additional storage, of which I have a 128MB one in there. Gorgeous.

What does London look like through the lens of the A20? Let’s find out.

I like trains

This was the journey where I learned that I have a slight delight about trains. I could never do the train autism thing that some people do, but it’s just so unlike what I’m used to, my part of Pennsylvania where transport is basically entirely cars, to see ultra-reliable, clean, zippy metal trains you can navigate in a little maze until you get where you wanna go. I have a weird sort of affection for the Piccadilly line, as the one that services Heathrow–that’s the line I go on with my Caby! It must be very amusing to anyone who’s just taken train their entire life to see my fascination with it all.

We did visit the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden, only to discover they wanted you to pay for the ability to get tickets in. We hung out in the cafe instead, Caby doodling and me reading a book on moquettes, that being the rugged fabrics and patterns making up Underground and Overground seats. We did find out that for the handsome sum of £2400 (just over $3200 USD for those playing at home), you can have a compact sofa made from the exact same material as the seats on the Underground, in your preferred moquette. (I’m traditional, my favorite is the blue Barman pattern up there.)

Going Underground (and walking aboveground)

Of course, as much as we took the Underground, there was still plenty of walking in between. Caby and I were both in pain for a lot of it, unfortunately, but we managed and survived and had a great time. Every trip brings us into a different part of London. Last year was our adventure into Soho (which we revisited this time because Forbidden Planet is fun as shit to browse), and this year found us adventuring into Elephant and Castle to visit a barcade. I’ll get back to that thought in a moment.

We don’t really have anything like London in the US. New York City is close, I guess, but it’s infinitely dirtier and seeing so many homeless people (which London and Cardiff certainly have as well, don’t get me wrong) definitely brings the mood kinda low. There’s so many businesses and eateries packed into these tiny little streets, serving Korean fried chicken or selling vapes with a K’NEX London Eye in the window, none of which Caby and I will ever visit in all likelihood. There’s a lot of hype and even merchandising around the new Elizabeth line, and the difference between its stations, all new with glass blocking access to the rails as opposed to the stony open air stations on the District and Circle lines we’re used to, is wild. Just walking around its evolving patchwork is weirdly fun, or at least memorable.

The barcade scene

If you’re not into retrogaming, barcades have become the primary way that arcades have survived into the 2020s. Sure, the games are fun enough, but what if you mix in booze and maybe even food? (We didn’t drink at the two we visited, Four Quarters in Elephant and Castle and NQ64 Soho, being focused on the games. I’ll be sure to remedy that for the NQ64 in Cardiff.) Both had good selections of games! Classics like Pac-Man (in stand-up) and Ms. (in cocktail form), Donkey Kong, OutRun, plenty of light gun titles (Namco’s Point Blank being my favorite), for sure lots of fighting games, Guitar Hero Arcade, where Caby was very brave and did great at co-op with me, even some pinball tables. Even some consoles running flashcarts! Four Quarters made you rent theirs, while NQ64’s were free to play. You can catch me playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 for the PS1 in one of the shots up there.

I definitely preferred Four Quarters over the NQ64 in Soho. I think they take care of their machines better (plenty of the CRTs were in iffy states, and the Galaga stand-up machine was virtually unplayable thanks to an unresponsive fire button, disappointing as the best Galaga player in the world), NQ64 was insanely loud on the background music and machines, like a fucking bar rave, and I thought the swearing on a lot of the warning labels mixed with the Mario-themed drinks seemed kinda tryhard. Still fun, but we were tired and itching to get back to Cardiff by the time we visited. The blacklight lighting was fun and turned my shoes pink, which seems apt, and the graffiti on the walls and tables was apparently partially real, so at least it had a cool grungy look going on.

So how’s the camera, Cammy?

Damn good. Given my recently-sorted saga with the AOL PhotoCam (third Letters post about that forthcoming), I wanted to bring along a camera I wasn’t gonna fight with the entire time, and the PowerShots have a reputation for being excellent, even going back to the early 2000s. This feels heavy and solid for a plastic body entry level camera, it saves shots quick, give it a 128MB CF card and you fit hundreds of photos on it, the colors are vibrant and accurate, it copes pretty well with situations of high contrast, and there’s very little fringing or lens distortion to speak of. Granted, that means you’re simply getting into the realm of nice pictures as opposed to the intentionally wonky ones I like out of early cameras, but dammit, these are easy on the eyes and I like that too.

As for what I don’t like about it, it always defaults to auto flash on startup, meaning Caby and I scrambled a few times using it to turn it back off for a reshoot. I always turn the camera off between photos to conserve battery (which the A20 takes four AA batteries that I’d like to conserve), so that meant pressing that flash button a lot. I wish I could turn off the digital zoom, but it doesn’t appear you can, so I just mostly used it with light zoom levels or none at all. I had to get used to the shorter FOV on this camera than the one on my phone, which made it tricky to get everything I wanted in shot sometimes. According to DPReview, you’ll want to play with the white balance presets to get the most accurate colors out of your shot if you’re shooting indoors, but I didn’t mind any of the tints I got from the shots I took indoors or out.

I’ve got four and a half weeks left in the country, so who knows what else this PowerShot will see. I’ll keep you all posted!