ther Pages of Rages

I was practicing with my lathe and I made some things.

First, a valve to adjust the flow of water through aquarium tubing:

This is cut from a piece of 1/2″ dia stainless steel rod. I need to deburr the screw more carefully, because it cut the tubing when I tried it out.

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I am looking for digital camera suggestions.

I often want to take pictures of things on my desk, and the point and shoot cameras just can’t do it. They just cannot focus close enough to fill the frame with an image.

For example, if I want to take a photo of my coffee cup, to obtain focus, I must pull back until the coffee cup fills about 1/30th of the frame.

Another requirement is a fast enough lens to have a short depth of field. For example, if I want to take a picture of my coffee cup, I want the cup to be in focus, but not the unruly stack of papers and mechanical detritus that covers the surface of the desk in the background.

I don’t really care to have a huge SLR camera. (SLR makes sense for film, but it is seems faintly ridiculous to have the vestigial pentaprism and mechanical mechanism in a digital camera.) I would like this camera to be self-contained.

The image size should be an honest million pixels, with resolution approaching the Nyquist limit. If I take a picture of a 12″ ruler that fills the frame, I should be able to see graduations that are (2*12/1000) or 0.024″ apart. That is, I will be able to see 1/32″ graduations, but not 1/64″. This is enough accuracy for me. (I have a belief that most consumer multi-megapixel cameras do not reach this level of resolution.)

Does anyone have a suggestion of a camera for me?