Great little camera
Pros:
small size, great image quality
Cons:
cheap plastic cover on USB port
The Bottom Line:
A great choice if you want a high-quality ultracompact camera for your vacation photos.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
This is a great little camera. It's about the size of a deck of cards and takes excellent pictures over a wide variety of conditions, including daylight outdoor scenes, indoor flash pictures, night-time scenes, and close-ups of small objects. You can learn how to take very reasonable photos with this camera in about five minutes -- it is very easy to use.
There is very little chromatic aberration at sharp edges or pin-cushion distortion in the images, which have both been common problems with ultracompact cameras.
If you don't care about the very small size, it makes no sense to buy an ultracompact -- you can get comparable performance in a compact camera for less money. But, for an ultracompact, this camera is a keeper. Its zoom is only 3X, but that is enough to be convenient in framing a candid shot quickly. And the zoom wheel is very well located for ease of use. The image size, 3.2 M pixels, is more than adequate for a camera of this size.
You will need a larger memory card than the supplied 16 MB, but SD cards have gotten quite inexpensive. I got a 256 MB card for $40 US, which is adequate for a typical vacation's photos. For people who want to use the video function, more memory would be a necessity. But I can't quite get my mind around the idea of using this camera for movies - even though it does a decent job for a still camera on them.
The On/Off button is small and a bit hard to use. This is better than the Casio Exilim I had used, where I was always turning the camera off when I meant to be taking a picture. But it is easy to fumble over if you're trying to get a quick snap off.
The USB does not officially support 2.0 -- it's a 1.1 USB. However, I have not experienced any problems in connecting it to my computer with the USB 2.0 port. Nonetheless, the manual warns about this being a possible problem -- which would be a big disadvantage if it had turned out to be true.
The cover on the USB port in the camera is a really cheap plastic flap that refuses to stay closed when the port is not in use. This is by far the cheesiest part of this generally-excellent camera's design.
