Good Camera for the Price

You're looking at the wrong camera if you want something to capture photographs for a fine arts exhibit or for holiday pictures and cards to send to your discriminating in-laws. This camera is not in the same league as a Canon G5, Olympus 5050 or the other higher end digital cameras.

This is an excellent camera if you need a camera to take pictures for your websites, newsletters, to document personal belongings, or just for casual photography. (It's perfect for your 5th grader!)

Looking for similarities in picture quality between this camera and a 35mm film camera, I'd say the Argus DC3500 is comparable to a $25-$40 35mm camera.

The details and quality of pictures taken with my DC3500 are good. This is a 2MP camera so you aren't going to see the individual yarn pattern on sweaters or the strands of hair from subjects standing 4-5 ft away. The color capture appears slightly subdued (even a bit washed out) and a little too far over into the red. This is easily and quickly corrected by adjusting the saturation and hue in any low-priced image editing software.

In "Super Fine" mode, there is about a 3 second lapse before the camera is ready for another picture as it processes and stores the picture to the CompactFlash card. In "Auto mode" the camera flash is smart enough to activate only. The camera allows the user to manually set the exposure but this appears useless as a lower setting gets you a dark and poorly captured image while a higher setting just gets you an overly bright and poorly captured image.

I've found out that this camera operates best if I don't try to "customize" the exposure settings and keep the flash in automode.

If you compare this camera to even an older one like the Olympus Camedia 3030 (or comparable) you're going to be disappointed. There just isn't any comparison.

But where it lacks in functionality and features, this camera more than makes up with its low price of under $70.