I learned an important lesson on our trip to Africa: don’t overpack your TSA bag.
Especially don’t overpack it with liquids in bottles that can be jostled open.
Especially especially don’t overpack it with liquids (like DEET) which can dissolve plastics when they’re in bottles that can be jostled open.
And most especially, don’t put the overpacked TSA bag in the same backpack as valuable electronics like a camera with a plastic body.
I had thought at first that the only damage was to the battery door, and it wasn’t too big a problem. But when we were on our Hudson River trip, I discovered that some of the buttons and one of the knobs no longer worked, so I sent it off to Lumix Pro Services when we got home.
It’s still there, and I’m hoping for the best…but in case the repair cost is prohibitive, I started looking for a replacement camera today.
My current camera is a Panasonic Lumix FZ-1000M2; it’s a superzoom, with a top zoom range of 16x. It’s comfortable, not too heavy, takes good pictures, and I’m pretty familiar with it, so I hope I don’t have to replace it.
But if I do have to replace it, I think I want to go mirrorless. The cameras I looked at are smaller and lighter, at least with the included kit lenses, and it’s always possible to get a bigger lens for a trip to, say, Africa or Alaska (neither of which is likely to be repeated soon).
I went to San Jose Camera; they let me play with several cameras, and the ones I liked the best were the Nikon Z5 (full-frame) and the Canon EOS R10 (APS-C). I want to check other brands, too, but that’ll require a trip to a different store.
It’s quite scary.