I’ve just hot-footed it back from the London launch of Corel Digital Studio 2010. The product is a combination of photo and video editing software, along with apps for burning and watching DVDs, all for the very reasonable (suggested) price of £60. But is it any good?

It’s certainly very slick. Both the PaintShop Photo Express and Video Studio Express applications share a common interface, which is clearly focused on making the software as easy to use as possible. In fact, if I had a pound for every time the words “easy” or “simple” were used in the hour-long demonstration, I wouldn’t have bothered coming back here to write this blog post, and would by now be sipping champagne with a lovely lady on my knee in one of Soho’s finest establishments.

This, then, is software aimed at digital media amateurs – or as Corel puts it “the general media user”. One of the 40% of people who don’t even bother to edit their digital photos after taking them.

Not surprisingly, such simplicity comes at the expense of features. PaintShop Photo Express, for instance, contains little you wouldn’t find in the free and equally charming Google Picasa 3. There was a very impressive wizard for creating photo books from your picture albums (including the option to turn them into glitzy Silverlight presentations) but seemingly little else to tempt you to part with hard cash.

Likewise, Video Studio Express dives towards the basic end of the spectrum. As you’d expect, there are lots of friendly wizards for turning your clips and photos into slick-looking movies – with title menus, transitions and captions – with minimal user intervention. However, it brings little new to the table for people who want to be a bit more creative.

Corel dragged Microsoft along to highlight that Digital Studio 2010 takes advantage of Windows 7’s new multitouch features. In our very brief tests on a HP touchscreen PC, we found the touch interface unresponsive and a little too finicky, and soon resorted back to the familiar mouse. We’ll reserve final judgement until we’ve had a chance to test it on a PC that hasn’t been smeared by a thousand fingers at a press event.

In short, Digital Studio 2010 looks like the kind of software that my dad would adore, but so far there appears to be little to tempt the average PC Pro reader.