Toward the end of last year, Claire & I went on the hunt for a new portable point and shoot digital camera. We’d had our Canon Ixus 65 for about three and a half years and while it functions perfectly & is in near new condition – it is getting a little long in the tooth.

For the last couple of years we’ve wanted to upgrade from a pocket sized digital camera and add a digital SLR into our photography arsenel but for whatever reason – we never got around to it. Conveniently, Harvey Norman happened to have a 20 month interest & repayment free promotion on at the moment – so we figured now was a perfect time to jump in with both feet.

My original plan was to buy a Canon EOS 550D digital SLR, as they’ve recently been superseded by the Canon EOS 600D and figured that it’d offer a good bargaining chip for me, as they’d want to clear their old stock.

After talking to a really helpful older staff member at Harvey Norman, I’m quite sure that plan would have worked swimmingly – up until he said that they have virtually no stock of any make or type of digital cameras as a result of the March 11 tsunami in Japan. He’d said that within a day or two of the tsunami, they’d been contacted by three or four of the major camera manufacturers and told that their orders had been cancelled and not to expect new stock until September at the earliest.

Instead of Harvey Norman having dozens of Canon digital SLR cameras in stock of various models, with a plethora of lens to boot – they had four – 1x Canon 550D and 3x Canon 600D. I thought I was still going to be in luck, until I realised that they had no lens kits availabile for the Canon 550D -which after talking to Andrew last night, he recommended getting a second larger lens.

In the end, we opted to pay a little more and go with the latest model – a Canon EOS 600D digital SLR twin lens kit. The Canon 600D packs some pretty kick arse figures – 18 megapixels, 3″ LCD screen, shoots full 1080p HD video, does 3.7fps continuous shooting with 9 point auto focus and 100-6400 ISO. The two lens that come with the kit are an 18-55mm and a 55-250mm, which seems like a good spread at this stage. We’ve now got to learn how to wrangle it – but what I know without knowing anything, is that it takes a mean photo by just point & clicking!