Review 1 of 7
Price Paid:
$250.00
from Forgot where, NYC Summary: Limiting is the first word that comes to mind.
This camera is definately only for point and shoot. It's reasonably flexible, with macro crap, and various other features, but it's not for control freaks.
Doing stuff like disabling flash, changing white balance or metering is a lengthy process, often not worth the time wasted on it.
Manual focusing is not an option. You simply can't do it. There isn't any indication of where the exact focusing point is, either. Just that focusing is OK. Whatever that means.
Control over exposure (no, not exposure compensatioon) is not possible.
Digital zoom is a joke, never listen to it. You can emulate it later in photoshop.
It's got no viewfinder, which makes setting up pictures in daylight sometimes annoyingly difficult.
It's slow. There's a half second delay between pressing the button and getting an exposure, so it's very hard to capture "moments". Additionally, about a 2-4 second delay stops you from redoing the shot if it broke, depending on the card speed and the amount of interpolation the camera is doing (usually lots in low light).
Battery life is also a mess. It sucks through AA size batteries in a ferocious pace. We use 2100mah batteries which last about 40 exposures, with some looking around and giving up. I think most of it is wasted on the servo zoom, folding the lens in an out, and the never off back lit LCD.
On the other hand it's quite snappy, and easy to use if you do only one thing - shoot what you see, in broad daylight. You can see something, pull it out, and in a reasonable amount of time get an image of it. It's popular with the less control freakish members of the family.
The output is pretty good for this resolution, with more detail than grain up close.
I've shot some nice pictures with this. It's survived close encounters with various hard surfaces. It has created about 20,000 pictures so far, and looks like it will keep doing that for a while. The price was good, because we were on a budget. We forgot the SLR and were travelling transatlantic, so we bought it last minute.
I don't consider it a camera, but rather a toy. It's really that limiting. It lacks the real time speed of a point and shoot, like my lomo, giving you a quick but delayed usability, and it also the flexibility of a DSLR. Strengths: Convenient, quite small
Surprisingly durable
Economical - you can shoot lots and lots of endless junk, and all it costs you is the man hours to delete it.
Quick to use [conventionally]. This does not mean it's responsive though! Weaknesses: Battery life is HORRIBLE
Not for control freaks.
Delays in responsiveness. Customer Service: Not needed yet
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