pretty good deal for a starter camera

I'd been wanting a digital camera for a while. I'm a digital artist and have worked with high end cameras before but am cheap and only need it for sending pix over email, so I figured I'd get something kind of cheesy, knowing that I could fix the images if need be. So when I saw this baby for sale at a store closing for half off, I couldn't resist.

I wasn't expecting much, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. The images were pretty good! It does best in daylight of course, as it has no flash. So if you're wanting to take indoor pictures at night, get a different camera. But for daylight pictures I was happy with it. There were a few that turned out really wierd, where the color was totally shifted. It also tries to brighten every picture for you if it thinks the levels aren't perfect, which looks just terrible-- it really blows out the highlights. But if you are careful in composing your picture [be very very aware of lighting], you should be able to get some decent images. And there is no shutter lag at all-- that typical half second delay that so many digital cameras have where you press the shutter, it pauses, then it takes the picture, which is very nice.

The downside is that it has no flash, which severely limits its usefulness indoors. It actually refuses to capture an image if it thinks there is not enough light, which is frustrating because I was hoping I could just fix dark images myself. And it uses internal memory similar to the RAM on a computer, which means if you turn it off, you lose all your pictures. So it has a sleep mode which it goes into after 30 seconds of no activity. The book says it will last two weeks in standby mode before the two AAA batteries it takes die. I haven't been able to verify this yet. Although the good thing is that it uses power from the USB when it's connected to the computer so you could potentially leave it on for as long as you want [while the computer is on anyway] without having to worry about batteries dying. If not, as long as you are able to download them to your computer somewhat often, this should be ok. Oh and there is no display on the back to show you what your pictures will look like. There's just a little lcd counter to let you know what mode you're in and how many pix you have left.

But it does have several modes. A video mode which can take a few seconds of video; a 10-second self-timer; low-res; and a clear-memory mode. I don't know why it has this last mode when all you have to do is turn it off to erase the memory but maybe they were going for perceived value of five modes instead of four. Anyway the high res mode take pictures at 640 x 480, and you get 26 of them before you have to download to your computer. Low res is 320 x 240 and fits 106 images. Video mode captures video at about 10 frames per second, so you end up with about 2 seconds of video. Don't know how useful this is but it could be good for live action shots where the perfect image only lasts for a split second.

Software: I only installed the driver, and used Adobe photoshop to capture the images. It works absolutely perfectly. The only problem I ran into was that in the capture window, if you switch to 'video' mode, it erases all the pictures from the camera! This has got to be a bug. So if you take video, you'll have to import it as frames, save them all out and stitch them together using quicktime or some other little utility. I have not tried the other software that comes with it, but it has a utility to stich together images into a 360 panorama which looks rather neat.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. But I had low standards. :) But if you can find it for less than $50 then jump on it. Just don't expect much in low light.