i'm doing some hard thinking. my birthday is in a month and i'm told if i buy a digital camera or a graphics tablet i can get 25-50% of the price paid by kind and loving parents. if i decide to wait with both those things they will get me a surprise gift instead, which is what i usually want - i love surprises and hate getting money instead of a neatly wrapped up gift.
so, should i buy a new camera, considering mine is now twelve years old and very, very tired and starting to give me trouble but has always worked better for me than any other camera, digital or not, that i've ever tried. or should i buy a graphics tablet - something i'm really starting to see the need for. or should i say i want to be surprised and not get the economical help to buy either of these things?

and let's say i want to buy a camera. this, from 2001, is what i have now and am used to. i would want something with all the same functions and not much more (better zoom capacity is a dream, but i can live without it). my upper price limit would be somewhere around 400 usd/250 gbp. anyone who can recommend me a good camera?
or let's say i wanted to buy a graphics tablet. what tablet? which ones can be used with gimp? or inkscape? and has anyone tried wacom's inkling and knows if that's even worth trying?

Well, I have 5 cameras, my big dslr Olympus and my Nikon 3300 are my main ones, but personally I'd go for the tablet. My bamboo is worth it's weight in gold and seems to work with everything.

Decent cameras can be gotten anywhere for very good prices but tablets aren't so,

I'd say ask for a surprise and they might buy you one of your options completely.
But that's just an opinion.

Get the camera; trust me. Time for a new one anyway. Twelve years means it's a dinasaur. lol

Given what you've told us, I would buy a tablet and save the left over money towards a new camera. I don't know the best tablet to get as I just use a Wacom Bamboo one but I would be looking mainly for superior touch sensitivity if I had that kind of money to spend.

I like my bamboo because it's small. I do most of my.....whatever it is I do late at night laying in bed. Something bigger would get in the way. In either case I'd only get a wacom.

When is your birthday?

next month .

23 years old, right?

er... did i say that? well, at least it's not twentyfour ! nice weather here in sweden, by the way.

i thought i'd come back to this thread and give you an update - not because you've been nagging me for it, exactly, but because it's my turn to gloat a bit . the good advice from the gc crowd was to get a tablet for the birthday money from my parents and i fully intended to buy one. then, my old trusted friend the canon powershot was so extremely tired the last time i took him out to play that i thought: maybe a camera isn't a bad idea anyway... and then my birthday money came and turned out to be more than i had expected or even hoped for. so, i bought a new camera! because i wanted a model that wasn't one of the very latest in the powershot series (i had my mind set on something that wasn't too far from the one i was used to but with better zoom) it was hard to find in stores and i ended up buying one that had been on display in the store. for that, i got a nice price reduction and all those insurances they always want to sell you, so my budget still allowed for some more spending. i got myself one of those mini tripods with bendable legs for the camera too and still had money i could spend, so i got a camera bag! i've only just started to get to know my new camera (like i had hoped for it's very similar to my old one, but there's all sorts of things to learn anyway) so i won't post any pictures yet, but it looks like this could really improve my photography.
a birthday is a very, very good thing to have once in a while !

Happy belated birthday!

it sounds like you got yourself a lot of goodies for what you spent! That makes for a very nice birthday, indeed.

sallyanne: thank you ! i'm actually still celebrating - tomorrow dinner and a bollywood movie with two of my sisters and a cousin, on saturday party for whoever of my friends want to come .
2-ton: yes, i keep looking at all the stuff and feeling rich .

Belated Happy Birthday AnMal. I'm sure you made the right decision.

erisian: thank you - i think i did . i'm hoping for perfect spring weather now so i can go out and take photos of the empty trees against the blue sky.

jani333: i am very happy with the camera i bought - like you said, essential part of a fun life . my birthday was in february, almost a month ago - this thread is an old one. but thanks for the thought!

You've done a really nice job on the avatar Erisian, it's very thoughtful