I used to be a late adopter, and kept gadgets way past their use-by date. Amortized the living hell out of my stuff. I kept my Compaq Concerto (early monochrome tablet PC) going for a decade, until I got comments at coffee shops: "Whoa, black and white - old skool, dude!" I don't like being called dude, or hearing 'school' spelled with a 'K', so now I adopt earlier and replace more often. And, side benefit, I can recoup some value from the old stuff on eBay.

Back in the day, say, the 12th century, gadgets were made to last. A "gadget" in those days, after all, was, say, a goblet. Perhaps a dagger if you were really cutting edge. Ha ha. Sorry.

But that dirk or chalice (or pyx - look it up, why doncha) would last for about a thousand years, if it didn't get in the way of vandals, looters or sackers. A husband might get his 12 year old wife a brand new reliquary for their anniversary, to contain her precious metacarpal bone of Little St. Hugh of Lincoln. And, boy, would her friends be envious! And that reliquary would be handed down, unto the nth generation.

Unless, of course, it was vandalized, looted, or sacked.

Today, we give and get digital cameras. And, ten months later, they are obsolete, quaint, and slightly embarrassing. So we face yet another dilemma not envisaged by our ancestors. Not just how to avoid the plague and crush a peasant uprising, but whether and how to stay up-to-date in our gadgetry.

Take, for example, me. I am the proud owner of a Fuji FinePix F30 digital camera. I bought it about ten months ago, and it has been giving me yeoman service, taking high quality family snaps, and the occasional xtreme close-up of an insect on a flower. Small enough to carry everywhere, barely makes a bulge in my blazer, and it takes very nice low-light pictures. That is its special gift, being able to operate at a shockingly high ASA of 3200, with less "noise" than other cameras. "Less," mind you, not "none."

Let me explain. In any digital photo, there is noise. Each little spot on the sensor (also called a CCD or Charge Coupled Device - I'd write more about it, but I don't know that anyone comes to LA2DAY for a lesson in quantum physics; if you want that, let me know!) gets a signal in the form of the light coming through the lens. But it also sees and hears noise from inside the camera - from the neighboring pixels on the sensor, from the circuitry of the camera, even from cosmic rays. The reason the picture looks like your cousin Velma instead of snow is that the signal, the light through the lens, is so much louder than the noise inside the camera. This is what we "smart people" call a signal-to-noise ratio. A high signal-to-noise ratio makes for a crisp picture. When you take a picture in low light, the signal is much lower, but the noise inside the camera is the same, so the ratio gets lower, and you get a noisier picture. The special trick that the engineers at Fuji taught the F30 is how to produce less internal noise. Clever.

But now I've had the camera for a little while, and the romance has worn thin. It's not her, it's me. She is still lovely and capable, but I've met a few flaws, such as the annoyingly non-standard USB port and the xD flash memory card. Maybe because it is a scarcer format, but a lot of third-party xD memory card readers are, how shall I put it... CRAP. I still love some of my F30's special little tricks, such as taking two pictures in quick succession, one with flash, one without. Nifty! I'm just not ready to make a long-term commitment to a camera yet. And now I see that David Pogue at the New York Times (www.nytimes.com/pogue) is recommending the Canon PowerShot SD800 IS, and, being a NYTimes sheep, I have to have one. I do whatever David Pogue says. Not proud of that, but it's true.

What are this fickle consumer's choices? I can bite the bullet and just keep using my camera until it stops working and won't be worth fixing. I'll probably dunk it in salt water within three years, or drop it from six feet onto concrete, or it will just give up the ghost on its own. Or I can bite a different caliber of bullet - just buy the Canon, and keep the Fuji. Maybe I could give it to a relative. But you know what happens then? I would get a dozen calls a week about whether I have a certain accessory, or why does it do this or that. Here's my advice: only give a used device to a friend or family if you are willing to be free tech support for a year. So, if you're lonely, it might actually be a good idea. I'm already tech support for too many things for my friends and family, I don't need to add this.

Or I could sell the FinePix F30 on eBay. New ones are going for $300, so mine might get about $225. Of course, the thing about eBay is it takes a little time to put something up. When am I going to have a chance? I'd better check my book of hours...

Peter Basch