Every so often it hits me. Time zips by and I forget to eat, ignore my cats' insistence on a head-rub, and only get up to visit the bathroom. Am I researching useful info on presidential candidates, or locating examples of living-wills for my relatives? Nope, just visiting DPreview, Imaging Resources, etc. looking at specs, image samples and owner comments relating to the recent crop of DSLR's.

Last year I talked myself out of a DSLR and bought an updated super-zoom Fujifilm S5200. Kept my 2MP super-zoom Olympus C2100 because it's good at digital near-IR.

Now that I'm photographing dogs and cats at the county shelter (in reduced light and without a partner to act as a handler), I'm talking myself into the "need for speed" -- being able to raise my ISO without adding visible noise. I'm shooting at high ISOs and slow shutter speeds and many shots are blurred due to my hand shaking (always a problem for me, but now I have one hand on a moving cat/dog and one hand on the camera). I have to upload the images at the shelter without benefit of editing in Photoshop, so I can't shoot in raw or remove the noise. I had hoped to avoid the use of flash (spooks some cats/dogs), but have had to add it to the mix to keep the noise level of the images at a reasonable level.

A DSLR could deliver clean images at 1600 ISO, thus reducing my need for flash and helping the animals get better photos with less stress and find new homes faster --- sounds reasonable to me

But I know it's my camera lust attacking again...