This summer Hongyun and I are planning a month long European extravaganza. We're probably going to be in 3 major locales at most in order to maximize immersion time in each place. Which places are we planning to go to? Who cares! Let's just get to tech toys we're going to be bringing along.

First and foremost: Cameras. At first, I was planning to bring my Canon Digital Rebel XT, but then I'd have to fork out for a few lenses and then lug them around. I'd normally be all for this, but budgetary constraints as well as the lack of desire to lug around expensive, fragile gear is telling me I should simplify a bit.

We thought about getting a new-fangled HD Video camera like the canon HV20,but I thought that it's too pricey and not to mention we don't plan on getting an HD TV until late 2008 so there's nothing to watch this one anyway. Also, we'd have to carry around tapes which I wasn't looking forward to. Even with all of the downsides, getting one of the first consumer HD cams to have a true 24P cinema mode and great low light performance was (and still is very tempting). Who knows...maybe we'll pick one up if our budget for the trip is not too insane.

I think we've decided on going with a pair of tiny and cool kodak cameras. The first is the Kodak V705 which was an ultra-wide angle zoom lens and goes up to ISO 1000. This will be great for sweeping panoramas and tall building shots. The size seems perfect and it also includes a nice enough video feature that we can use for those occasions when video is desirable.

The other is the Kodak V610 which looks almost identical to the V710, but has a 10x zoom lens for zooming in for details.

The cool part of having two cameras, is that we can both have one in our pockets and switch off very easily. I bet they both use the same type of battery so we can carry only one charger and a couple of spare batteries and memory cards too.

The other major decision in the tech arena is whether to bring a laptop or not. We'd use the laptop primarily for offloading content from the cameras and for looking up information. While this is a nicety, it is also an extra 7lbs in our pack. I'm actually very used to carrying around a ton of gear so it shouldn't be much of a concern for me to bring Hongyun's MacBook, a stack of DVD-Rs, and a plug along for the ride. The other option is to go hog wild on memory card since they are rather cheap now. For a hundred bucks, we can get a LOT of memory cards. We actually already have 2 1GB microSD cards, a 2GB SD, and a 1GB miniSD card that can be used with the Kodak cams (since these cards all have adapters to standard SD). I bet we can pick up a bunch of 1GB and 2GB cards between now and July. I think we'll need 10-20GB at most (and that's if we're big into the video)--yes, we take that many photos. I guess we can be a little more selective of the photos and stop polluting flickr, but why when it's so easy to?