Ten Years of Digicams

Canon threw a small breakfast today at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology to commemorate the tenth anniversary of its pocket-sized, fashion-forward Elph point-and-shoot digicam (the first two-megapixel model launched in 1996). It's hard to believe that as recently as the late '90s, we were still using film-based cameras (I remember feeling blown away by Intel's film-less 640 x 480 CS630 back in the late '90s). Now we take things for granted (and Canon's most recent version of the slim and chic Elph, the SD40, is 7.1 megapixels).

Other than a mostly self-congratulatory event that featured nearly an hour's worth of Elph-hype (come on, it's hardly the only stylish digicam out there), Canon's breakfast served as the launching event for, not surprisingly, two fashion-forward product announcements: The Canon Powershot SD900 Digital Elph Coach Edition Gift Set and the auctioning off of ten limited-edition bejeweled (by NYC Peach) Powershot cameras to benefit the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

If you've got the money, go for the bejeweled cameras, which will not only benefit a good cause, but also make your photo subjects guaranteed to be all googly-eyed (the shining jewels are centered around the lens).

The Coach set features a titanium-covered SD900, a black-leather Coach camera bag with a wrist strap, a Coach-branded metal neck strap, as well as a 32 MB SD card and a lithium ion battery. It also comes in a nice white box—all for $459.99 arriving later this month. Not a bad deal for a fashion-forward tech-related gift.