G4 Platinum: What I hate most so far

In my former life I was a newspaper photographer. Actually, a damn good one. That was a long, long time ago and the technology we used back then was primitive compared to what we have today. I racked up a lengthy list of Associated Press awards using cameras that didn’t even need batteries to function.

No auto focus. No auto exposure. The machines I used for covering the news were mechanical. But oh what machines they were. Precise. Solid. Brass and gears and steel and glass. Heavy, but with movements as smooth as butter. And when you pressed the shutter, you got the image your eye beheld. Exactly. Precisely. What the famous shooter Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment.”

When the world went digital, my photography skills went to hell. Shutter lag was the bane of my existence. You no longer got the exact split-second image. The momentary lag it took for the digital camera to capture its image gave me a very different image from the one I wanted. The lag has gotten better and better as camera improve. But it’s still too long for me, at least in the most recent digital camera I own. That ever-so brief extra breath the digital camera takes is long enough for a facial expression to shift, smoke to drift, light to change, or flying sparks to die.

The decisive moment is lost.

And why am I talking about this today? Because the G4 acts like an early digital camera. You press the button to find out what your decisive blood sugar is, and nothing happens.

Not a damn thing.

You press again. And again. Is the little fucker broken? Already? Then, like a sleepy child opening one eye in protest as she’s being woken for school by an insistent parent, her screen flickers to life.

Dex Seven woke up when you pressed the button. Like a film camera, on the job on demand. But the G4 is like a digital camera. I’m not quite sure how long it takes, about three seconds by my reckoning. Long enough to drive me crazy. Is this the price of having a color screen? I don’t think so. My iPod has a color screen and it springs to life.

Does it matter? Damn right it does. I take a lot of pictures of my blood sugar every day.