mello

You said it. I went out once on BF, a couple years ago, started at Walmart at 4am. I decided never to do that again. It gave me a view of humanity that I would have rather not seen. This incident is very, very sad, but it is not surprising to me after what I saw 2 years ago.

That's just sick and wrong. I'm SO done with ebay, it has become nothing but a huge greed-fest. Dh stopped by CompUSA on his way home from work Thanksgiving night - got there about 2 minutes past 9 (they were open from 9-12pm). He was only looking for a couple SD memory cards, so figured there'd be no problem, but the sales associates said 1 guy had just bought them ALL. Now you know those are on ebay. I know it's free-enterprise and all, but here's the thing; once dh (and others) found out the things they were looking for were gone in the first minute, they all turned around and left the store, didn't take the time to look around and see what else was there at all, so a lot of good these loss-leaders are really doing the company when one person's allowed to buy everything out immediately. Why don't they get a clue and put some limits on things??? Truly, after getting beat out by ebayers time after time over the last couple years, dh and I made the decision not to even get up and go out for BF this year. We got everything we wanted online, and slept in on Friday!

Similar experience here. I didn't care if mine shipped after Christmas 'cuz I'm using them for birthday gifts later anyway, but my ship dates were late Dec. and Jan originally. I've already gotten emails with earlier ship dates, and one has shipped out already. I think they must be getting more in daily and they're just giving a safe estimate at first.

Online only.

I also noticed they were gone from the website last night. Just for the heck of it I stopped by my Target tonight and found one! I'm so happy since this is the thing dd says she wants for Christmas.

Sheesh, you'd think they had something exciting to hide - something so mind-bendingly fantastic as to blow the competitors away ! Or maybe they just want to hide the fact that they really don't have anything to offer this year.

Ditto here.

So far I haven't found a single thing worth getting up and out for on BF. I'm looking for cameras, game systems, games and toys, but at this point I've found better deals at Amazon and other places online - particularly on the cameras and camera equipment. I'm extremely disappointed in the so-called deals on gaming systems - no great prices, just the addition of some junk I don't need or want added into bundles that cost more! I think part of the problem is the trend toward tight price controlling by manufacturers. The Nintendo DS never goes below 129, but for BF we get one for 149 with a dumb game not of our choosing added in, and maybe a scrawny store gift card. The Leapster rarely goes below $59, but Wally-world packaged it for the same price, again with a dumb game not of my choosing. Not buying it. Literally. They're going to have to do better. Especially with the price of gas - why go out?

I'm usually at least half finished, if not not more, by BF. I don't actually even go out every year - only if there's something really worth going for. Otherwise I do lots of online shopping. It's so much nicer to shop in my jammies by the fire with a cup of tea than be out freezing in the dark at 4am! And sometimes the deals are just as good or even better. That said, there's just no other adrenaline rush quite like a good BF!

That's a good deal. Curious where? It wasn't the deal that swayed me though - I was on the fence about whether to go dslr or p&s, as I was really looking to replace my p&s that we lost, though I found the dslr's tempting! I still have my old Canon AE-1 if I decide to lug around a slr, and really need something smaller for certain circumstances, so decided on a p&s instead this time around.

Did the code put them back down to where they were prior? I notice a lot of places do that.

Thanks for the tip! I just received my 20% off coupon in the mail today, tried to use it with this deal, then realized it isn't valid until the Nov 9. At first I thought I'd wait 'til the 9th to order, then decided this is such a good deal as is, that I don't want to risk waiting and be sorry, so I went ahead and ordered now anyway. DH will be THRILLED!

If you want to go the SLR route, check Costco - they had the Canon Rebel XT with two lenses and a free 1 or 2 gb (can't remember which) memory card for a pretty darn good price a few weeks ago when I was looking. I almost sprang for it. Almost. But i opted for a p&s instead.

Check out the Canon G9 (or G7). I just got a G9 and I'm very happy with it. I'm in the same boat - would love a dslr to replace my old non-digi slr, but not ready to spend the $$$ yet. I did, however want a really good p&s for kids' sports photos, portraits, and macro too. This camera does it all - plenty of manual overrides as well as lots of great scene modes and custom settings too. It's pretty fast, and I've had good success getting shots of my son playing hockey in an indoor rink, in both sports mode and shutter speed priority mode with a high iso and fast shutter speeds. I also got some nice portraits of the kids in both portrait mode and aperture priority mode. Lots of flexibility. It has macro, but I haven't worked with it yet, however the shots I've seen online look pretty darn good. The best price I found was at Amazon a few weeks ago.

You want to look for optical zoom as opposed to digital zoom, and definitely do some online research to at flickr and cnet, etc (here too!) to see the quality of images, features, pros & cons, etc. of any cameras you're considering. Optics are more important than megapixels for quality, since once you get up past 5mp or so, if you're printing regular 4x6 prints without cropping, there won't be much difference. If you're cropping a lot, or printing bigger photos, 7-8mp should be sufficient for most users. Canon's optics have always been quite reliable, and Sony's Carl Zeiss optics are excellent too. Those two brands would be my top two picks. I'd take a 5mp Zeiss lense over a camera with a lesser lense and 8mp any day. Oh, another thing you might want to look for would be a camera that uses the lithium type rechargeable batteries instead of just plain-ol AA's. You'll spend a fortune in batteries otherwise.

Same here.