Handy little camera with decent picture quality

Author's Rating:

Pros: Good pictures, tiny, good battery life, waterproof, solidly built.

Cons: Low-light performance sometimes spotty, no lens cover.

The Bottom Line: 
A fine little camera, great for active-lifestyle folks who still want to take pretty good pictures, even in places where a high-end camera should never venture.

Author's Review
We have a large digital camera that has a big zoom lens and takes excellent pictures. However it is fairly big, fairly heavy and certainly not something you can just knock around or get wet.

We were going to Hawaii for a big vacation and wanted something smaller, lighter and a little more rugged than our principal camera. This little guy was a great find and we are very pleased with our decision to buy it.

Highlights:

It takes surprisingly good pictures for such a small camera. The image quality appears very much on par with more standard-sized digital cameras. You really aren't paying any significant image quality penalty getting this versus a standard-sized digital camera. It is no threat to those super-high end cameras with huge lenses, but we have been very pleased with the quality of the pictures it takes.

It is very small and it is waterproof. As I had hoped, I can toss it into a day pack for a hike or take it kayaking without any worry. You can't take pictures underwater with it, but I have used it successfully in very wet environments with no ill effects. The one issue I have along those lines is that I do keep it in a small camera bag because I am worried about the front lens getting scratched. If you really want to travel light, you could put it in a plastic bag or something, but I wouldn't just toss it loose into a bag with anything potentially sharp.

The screen is bright and easy to see even in daylight You will have to look at the manual a little bit when you first get it, but once you understand the layout the controls are extremely easy to use. The buttons are nicely designed and I have had no trouble using them.

The little doors for the battery and memory card have solid looking rubber grommets that will likely last quite a while. In fact the whole thing appears to be very thoughtfully and solidly put together. You get the impression that it is a high-quality device which isn't going to fall apart on you anytime soon.

I have used nothing but NImH rechargable batteries in this camera (they are interchangeable with my other camera, meaning only one recharger needed for both). I haven't tracked exactly how many pictures I can take or how long the battery lasts, because battery life is just no big deal with this camera. The battery seems to last a very reasonable amount of time. I keep one set of spare batteries and have 2 256 MB cards, and that is plenty for virtually every situation.

Downsides:

In moderate low-light situations, where the flash should still not really be required, the computer will occasionally set the capture interval at a length of time such that the resulting picture is blurry. This doesn't happen in daylight or when using the flash, at least for me, but I have had some bad pictures because of this.

It has a bunch of modes for different situations, but doesn't have a fully manual mode where you can set everything like you would with an SLR. This is not a camera for serious photography, but I would still like the option to go fully manual if I could. The analogy is to an electronic automatic transmission with different shift point programs. You can pick which automatic settings the computer uses, but can't really control things the way somebody with a stick-shift can.

The smooth front face and tiny size means it is relatively easy to take a picture of your own finger. And to answer your question, no I am not just a doofus.

The memory card that is supplied with it is something like 8 meg, which is basically completely useless it is so small. I don't know why manufacturers skimp on the memory so much. Budget for at least one 256 Meg card, and if you want to use it on a long vacation without access to your computer, better to get two of them. We just about filled both of our cards on a two-week trip, using the highest quality picture setting, which is all I ever use. I just don't understand people who willingly degrade the image quality of their pictures because they don't want to buy an extra memory card, and then complain about how crappy their pictures look.

Overall:

This is a nice, high-quality little camera that takes good, sharp pictures. That such good pictures come out of such a small and handy package is really quite amazing. I expect I will be using this little guy for many years to come and am quite satisfied with the purchase.