Amazing multi-tasker
Pros:
Very small and durable with an MP3 player, 7.2MP images and NTSC/VGA video.
Cons:
Complicated access to special features, you need to buy a flash card.
The Bottom Line:
This is a great little camera, with a ton of features - MP3, video etc. The advanced stuff can be complicated but not inaccessible.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
We bought an NV3 6 months ago and have really been happy with it. It has done well night and day on the beach and in Europe (the charger is dual voltage). It has an internal lithium battery that is well sized. We consistently shoot well over a hundred images on one charge. You could buy another battery as well because it is easy to pop out. You can charge the thing on USB as well. It is a really small package about 2" X 4" X 1/2" with rounded sides and a 38 - 114 mm lense with an internal 3X optical zoom mechanism that means that the lens doesn't stick out ever and also seems to make it more durable because of that. It also has another 5X of digital zoom available if you don't know how to crop in post processing. The zoom button is a little less than completely responsive at times but it never stops for more than a fraction of a second. There is also a macro mode that goes down to about 1/2" too. The great thing is that because it takes images of 7.2 MP, you have a lot of room to work with in your images. The images are always jpegs. I would have liked a tiff option but it hasn't been a problem. I also highly recommend buying a 1GB or more SD card because 15 MB of internal memory is about useless especially when shooting video. The video is great though. It is 30fps AVI (MPEG-4) up to 720 x 480, and you can use the zoom while in video mode. It also records decent wav files and this has been surprisingly useful.
In general the images have been really good in any situation. The camera has a bunch of smart modes, including a text mode (for OCR), and an anti-shake mechanism. Although they are a pain to set sometimes, they work, especially the anti-shake (although it is slow). The tiny flash really seems to know what's needed and has saved several images that would have had no chance in my older digital cameras. The 230K pixel LCD is adequate although I did like the one on a comparable Nikon better. There is no glass viewfinder.
There are also the bells and whistles. It plays MP3s! Of course it has sound effects (Rock, classical etc. to optimize then too). I found it really strange but ended up using it on a plane to Europe to listen to music and even watch a little video. It isn't an iPOD and I haven't tried it with iTunes files, so check that if it's important to you, but it's perfectly serviceable for listening to standard MP3s with the included ear buds. You can even put a text file on the card and read it on the screen. That would be useful if it were the only gadget I carried. The nice thing is that you can keep all of your files (video, text, MP3, images) on the same card and get access to them all through this thing.
I can't comment on the software. It is Windows & Mac only and I run Linux with Gimp for image processing.
In all it's a great camera. If it had a phone, it could be the one carry-all for me when images are the priority (e.g. on vacation).
As always I write reviews only to inform and I don't usually make or respond to comments. Any proceeds go to charity.
