Photos
The pictures the camera produces are a little hit and miss. In good lighting, or under ideal conditions for the flash, the camera produces photos that are at least on a par with more expensive equipment. Its abilities under extreme lighting conditions are not so good.
As you can see from the two pictures here (the right being the cleaned version), the photos do show improvement with just a little touching up. This however does not help in dark conditions. The camera just does not seem to pick up enough information for you to touch things up later.
The camera 's macro mode is also a little hit and miss. If you get the distance from the object just right, it produces some good quality shots (under good lighting). There is very little noise to be seen in the photos, even when zooming in on the image after it's been taken. This shows that the CCD of the device is quite good. It seems that the downside to the device is probably due to the lens and software.
The lens issue also shows itself on shots where the lens is at its widest zoom, with a noticeable 'fish eye' effect seeming to happen, however the usual bugbear with cheap lenses is the corners, and this shows very little chromatic aberration.
Summary
The camera is certainly not the best of the current breed, but it's not the worst either. It's certainly very week on the features list, but some novice users will see this as a positive rather than a negative.
Framing of full frame shots could be an issue as the LCD display clips the edges, however this is not uncommon, and it seems to be the fashion to not put a proper view finder on compact cameras nowadays.
Article comments
1 - Raoul
Hi Ashley. I liked your review, but I also wanted to mention that I dislike photos with prominent watermarks. I understand you were trying to brand them, but still, smaller watermarks or none at all would have been much better.
2 - Ashleigh
The watermarkes on the large versions of the images are a lot less visible.
Cheers
Ashleigh