Product Reviews

Acer is a company better known for its laptops than its digital cameras. Now, however, it has released a 6.3-megapixel camera that costs just a little over £100. That's great value, if it can take a good photo.

Acer certainly didn't go overboard on design and this is a camera that's easily lost in the crowd. Being boxy, plain and somewhat plasticky could be excused, however, especially at this price, if we were repaid handsomely in features and image quality.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the case. There is no optical viewfinder and although the LCD screen is quite large, it's disappointingly fuzzy, making it hard to check the finer details of your photos. It's also annoying that when you take a picture, the resulting preview image appears so briefly that you have don't have time to check anything.

Ease of use

Casual snappers will appreciate the camera's simplicity. There are no scrolling lists of image modes and other confusing choices. Simply click into auto, or if you're snapping fast motion, switch into the sports mode. These options are located on a camera-top dial making mode switching quick, easy and friendly to those new to digital. The omission of essential image settings, however, could prove frustrating. Colour control is limited, outdoor images taken with the camera's flash are sometimes oversaturated and without a custom light-balance, controlling indoor lighting in particular isn't easy. There is no auto-focus illuminator either - this is a gadget built in to the camera that fires a beam of light at an object then times how long it takes before the beam of light bounces off the object and to

ADVERTISEMENT

hit the camera once again. This enables the camera to work out the distance between you and object you're photographing, helping it to focus correctly. The absence of this feature makes focusing a hit-and-miss affair in low light, especially given the camera's long shutter lag.

Shutter lag

The shutter lag is one of the most frustrating aspects of the CE6430. After you've pressed the shoot button, you can be left waiting for up to an aggravating five seconds or so before the shot is taken, giving shy subjects ample time to escape. ISO range is also poor, limited to the speeds ISO 64, 100 and 200. With such limited light sensitivity settings, you'll need a tripod to get good exposures in low light. Shots also suffered noticeably from digital noise - interference patterns that appear in images. Most compacts are noisy at high ISO speeds, the Acer's pictures exhibited noticeable noise patterns even at ISO 64, its lowest ISO speed.

Sunny conditions revealed the camera's poor dynamic range and sloppy metering. Look closely at scenes with lots of highlight and shadow, and you'll see that fine details are often blurry. This is okay for quick snaps, but if you were tempted by the high pixel count, you'll be disappointed with the poor clarity of the resulting images. We'd expect the pictures produced by a 6-megapixel camera to look a lot cleaner and sharper than the ones taken by the Acer.

It's easy to be misled by high pixel counts and low prices. The hundred pound mark is cheap for a 6-megapixel and seems like good value, but a good quality 4-megapixel camera will offer better quality and functionality for a similar price. Even if image quality was up to scratch (it isn't), this camera's terrible shutter lag and missing features would quickly become frustrating.

The idea of a basic, affordable, reliable digital camera with great resolution is ambitious, but it's what we have demanded from film compacts for years. It's a good example of why buying a digital camera is more complicated than the pixel to pound ratio. The Acer CE6430 is simple enough to operate and in theory its pixel count represents good value, but it doesn't have the reliability or image quality to be worth a recommendation.