Today I woke up and decided I was going to buy the cameras. All of them. I don’t know what came over me, but I woke up, went straight to the computer and started looking up camera prices online.
This process was rather difficult, as the cameras that I did research on two weeks ago weren’t available in South Africa in the time frame that I had, or they were too expensive. I worked out that I had about R8000 to spend on cameras, as Michael generously offered to sponsor the radiosondes and the weather balloons. However, if I was to spend R8000 on four cameras, each camera would have to cost around R2000. I knew that these days, good cameras go for double that new, so I would have to buy them second hand.
I started the process by looking up cameras on eBay, as it had the most options, but soon found out that some of the cameras didn’t ship to South Africa, or if they did, it would take around 3 weeks, time that I didn’t have.
The next step was to go to Gumtree, as this is the most used second-hand site in South Africa. Although it did have some cameras that I wanted, such as the G15 or the SX260, the former was too expensive at R3500, and the latter simply wasn’t good enough. At this point I remembered that I had previously looked up the different camera models for Canon such as the SX400s-600s.
I decided to try a different tactic. I refined my search to all Canon cameras, and then set up a price limit of R3000, and only show cameras in the Western Cape. This yielded a much smaller number of cameras, and I was able to quickly sift through all of them and find a few cameras that matched my criteria. I knew that I wanted 4 different cameras in my payload, 3 of them had to be able to take photos and one of them would be a video recorder. The Canon cameras would be the ones taking the photos and the GoPro would be doing the video recording.
Soon I had found 3 Canon cameras and one GoPro for sale on Gumtree, all within my price range. The first camera was a Canon Powershot SX620 HS, which was being sold for R1700. I had previously owned an SX610 HS, so I knew more or less what it would be like. It has a 20.1MP sensor and a 25-625mm film equivalent lens, which is rather impressive. The second camera was a Powershot SX500 IS. From the photos and the reviews, it seemed to be a very good option, especially for the R2500 price tag. It has a 16MP CCD sensor and a whopping 24-720 film equivalent lens. Although it is bigger than the SX620 HS, it actually has the exact same sensor, although its lens is bigger, which will allow for more light to pass through. The last Canon choice was the SX430 IS. When I saw the photos, it looked very similar to the SX500 IS, although there were not as many reviews on it. Since it was being sold for R2100, and it had a 20.5MP sensor, along with a monstrous 24-1080mm film equivalent lens, it looked like a good deal so decided to go with it.
The last piece of the camera puzzle was getting hold of a GoPro, which usually don’t come cheap. However, I was able to find a GoPro Hero 4 Silver being sold for R2000, which was not bad at all. The Hero 4 Silver was the first GoPro camera to make it big, and I had always dreamed of owning one. Although the battery life was not that great, the high resolution and the frame rate were very tempting, so I went with it. Its maximum resolution for filming is 4K at 15 frames per second (FPS). Although high resolution, the frame rate isn’t great, so I will probably be shooting in 2.7K at 30FPS.
Now I had decided on all the cameras. The Canons were the SX430 IS, SX500 IS and the SX620 HS. I also have my SX610 HS at home, but it is broken. However, I am thinking of maybe trying to get it fixed for a cheap price, thereby adding another camera to the fleet. The Other cameras are the GoPro Hero 4 Silver and my GoPro Hero 6 Black as a backup.
All in all, four cameras from Gumtree for R8300. Not bad.
The next step is to actually get them which I will do later today. The closest is the SX430 IS, which is just around the corner in Bergvliet, but the GoPro, SX620 HS and SX500 IS are all on the other side of the world (so to speak).
