Labs

With its two-tone styling and general air of having arrived accompanied by a loud bang, a motto and a paper hat, the Relisys is evidently happy to be the joker in the pack.

The RDC1000 is feather-light and encumbered by very few knobs and sliders, except for a pleasantly retro rotary slider that switches between normal and macro. Reaffirming the fun theme, power-up is accompanied by a Space Invaders-style ascending bleep tone and an animated logo. Unfortunately, using the RDC1000 is not fun. The controls on its LCD screen consist of small, fuzzy icons over a small, fuzzy image that disappears into blackness if you stray anywhere less well-lit than, say, the Superbowl.

If you think the power switch is hard to operate, wait until you try the joypad - it moves in all four compass directions and can be

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clicked to activate a feature; unfortunately it never seems to know which of these you're trying to do. This is annoying as it makes the menus hard to navigate and the digital zoom hard to operate.

There are three white balance modes - just as well, since auto is dodgy - and you can turn off the flash. ArcSoft PhotoImpression and VideoImpression are supplied, but not in the latest versions.

After you take each shot there's a delay of a few seconds before you can shoot again. This gives you time to prepare for the worst. Detail and colour gradation were mushed into a high-contrast, high-saturation smear, with strange things happening to anything red. Auto white balance was variable outdoors and coped badly with indoor lighting.

Nor could we persuade the Relisys to focus on a small subject in the middle of the frame rather than the background, the only camera on test that had this problem. We can't say whether our low-light shots were blurred, because they were invisible. It's all capped off by a macro mode that has a minimum focusing distance of 35cm - the Canon can get closer than that without even going into macro - and thus renders anything within hailing distance of the lens as an indistinguishable blob.

Cheap, yes. Cheerful, no. OK, you can get it for 65 quid, but why would you bother? If you don't need three megapixels, you may as well buy something even cheaper.