Product Reviews

The Agfa ActionCam is a lightweight digital camera aimed at high-end amateur and low-end professional users who want to take live action photographs. Resulting from a collaboration between Agfa and Minolta, the device is similar in style to Kodak's DCS range (basically, Canon and Nikon bodies fitted with digital backs), but is around a quarter of the price.

The camera is capable of producing good-quality 5Mb RGB image files with a colour depth of millions of colours. It can cope with low light and a variety of illumination sources without losing its full colour spectrum. The Dynax body with AF bayonet will take the full range of Minolta lenses, from wide-angle to telephoto.

As the ActionCam is designed for live action use, we tested it at the Phoenix Music Festival. We shot pictures for the NME Web site to evaluate digital input to output. We also exported some pictures to transparencies for a hard copy test.

It was immediately apparent that the ActionCam (like all other digital cameras) can't compete on an equal footing with a professional analogue camera in terms of speed and flexibility when shooting. However, it redeemed itself when producing relatively small images, and would be fine for output to digital media or to roughly the equivalent of a 400 ASA 35mm slide. Of course, the main selling point with this technology is that you're trading the analogue developing and printing process for the download, manipulate, upload and output scenario. But what you gain in time is proportional to what you lose in flexibility, speed and image quality.

Some of the ActionCam's problems lie with the initial Minolta hardware, some with the Agfa digital back, and some with the supplied software. For instance, whatever lens is used with the body (we used the supplied 50mm, f5.6 AF, as well as a 28-105mm f4) the camera will only give you a maximum aperture of f6.7 - positively Victorian in terms of lens speed. So, despite having a nominal CCD chip sensitivity equivalent to 800 ASA film, in a working situation it is reduced to around 200 ASA - a decent lens on a contemporary analogue camera would be f2.8 to f4.

Another problem is that the chip sensitivity is not adjustable.

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The manual advises that when taking pictures in bright sunlight, you should use neutral density filters to stop the exposure settings moving out of the camera's range. Unfortunately, this doesn't allow you to respond quickly to an urgent situation in the way an analogue does.

This lack of spontaneity is compounded by the Minolta hardware itself. In our tests, the autofocus was very slow, and it locked up the camera when it couldn't focus on a subject. This would be acceptable for a considered portrait session or a still-life, but in a fast-moving situation the moment is gone before the camera can respond, and you can end up missing a number of shots while the camera tries to focus.

The camera takes an average of about five seconds for each image to be written to the PC Card (not supplied). During those five seconds the camera is out of action and this, again, dramatically limits the scope for live action shots.

The issue of speed also came to the fore when attempting to use the software to download the images onto a hard disk. The 130Mb PC Card, which costs a staggering £586, holds 113 images in the Agfa proprietary format. Transferring them to a hard disk in this format by using the camera as a SCSI device and hooking it up to a desktop machine with the supplied cables is fast, but if you want to bulk convert the images into TIFF, JPEG or PICT file formats using the standalone software supplied, it takes nearly one minute per image.

If you've shot 100 images and only want to look at a quarter of them in any more detail than 1in x 1.5in thumbnails in the application, it would take 30 minutes, so if you're working in the field with a laptop, it's not long before your batteries are gone (the camera's Lithium battery lasts long enough for roughly 110 images to be taken).

The other option is to download in the proprietary format and work on the images at a later date on a desktop machine. This can be done using the supplied Photoshop Acquire menu plug-in (Photoshop LE is bundled with the camera as well as FotoTune calibration software, the FotoFlavor plug-in for colour correction and the Cumulus image database).

However, this takes even longer to acquire, there is no batch processing, and the plug-in doesn't return to the last-used folder. You really have to use the standalone batch processor and then re-open the images in Photoshop to work on them subsequently.

The ActionCam's thunder has probably been stolen by the Fuji DS 300, which produces a 4Mb image, has a burst rate of about 2fps and costs £2291 (£2692 inc VAT). But both of these cameras are now giving the Kodak DCS range a run for its money. Agfa is moving towards a truly usable and affordable professional digital camera, and for that it should be applauded.