Product Reviews

Until recently there were essentially two choices when buying a sub-£1,000 digital camera. Either you went for resolution, in which case there were half a dozen cameras close to the £900 mark, or you opted for value and ease of use, in which case you'd choose between the novelty of the Casio QV-10A or the low price of the Kodak DC20 (reviewed issue 23, p146).

Casio's built-in LCD display has attracted much praise, but buyers making this choice ended up with a modest optical resolution of 320 « 240. Now Casio's QV-100 aims to give you the best of both worlds. It boasts all the fancy features of the QV-10A, but an improved resolution of 640 « 480.

The concept of using an LCD display rather than the traditional viewfinder was borrowed from the camcorder market. It looks like it may become established practice in low-cost digital cameras. However, I'd voice a note of caution. With a conventional viewfinder, the camera is held firmly against the head. With the LCD display, it's held at arm's length which could contribute to camera shake. When you bear in mind that the QV-100 has no flash and therefore operates at a low shutter speed in poor light, an obvious consequence could be a blurred picture. This was confirmed in tests, although in bright light there were no problems.

In addition to its use as a viewfinder, the LCD doubles as a replay screen, thereby allowing the user to review photographs already taken. In conjunction with the selective erase feature, this is undoubtedly its main benefit. It also means that the unit can be used as a small presentation device. The QV-100's worth as a portable presentation unit is further enhanced by the fact that you can download bitmaps such as PowerPoint slides to the camera, and display images directly on a TV equipped with a composite video connector.

The QV-100 has

ADVERTISEMENT

4Mb of memory - a lot more than its low-resolution cousin. Even at its highest resolution of 640 « 480, this is sufficient to store 64 images. It's a vast improvement over some of the devices currently on the market, but belies a much higher compression ratio. This visibly effects image quality compared with other 640 « 480 cameras such as the Sanyo ImagePC (reviewed issue 25, p172). The QV-100 also has no PC Card slot for additional Flash memory or disk drives, either, tying you permanently to the built-in RAM.

Like the Kodak DC20, the QV-100 doesn't feature a flash unit, instead relying on the high sensitivity of the CCD. Also, the aperture can be switched between f/2.8 and f/8, thereby giving the user some control over depth of field. Although the automatic exposure is normally adequate, manual override is provided. The effect of changing the exposure is immediately visible on the LCD display.

Like the QV-10A before it, the LCD takes its toll on battery life. A set of batteries is supposed to last for around 150 minutes or 96 images, but in my experience they lasted much less. At two sets of four AA batteries for 25 exposures over 30 minutes, this is going to be an almost prohibitively expensive camera to run.

The QV-100 attaches to a PC via a serial port. The main purpose of the bundled QV-Link software is to download photographs from the camera, rather than photo retouching. You can save your images either in Casio's native format or as a TIF, BMP or JPEG. The package also permits images to be uploaded to the camera from the PC. This allows, for example, a photograph to be annotated using a graphics package, and the modified version written back to the camera for presentation purposes. Even non-photographic images such as presentation slides can be uploaded to the QV-100.

The QV-10A, while innovative, had too low a resolution to be much more than a novelty. With the QV-100, however, you can have the novel features and a reasonably high resolution. Certainly there are higher resolution cameras around, but 640 « 480 is adequate for most corporate applications. Like all digital cameras, it isn't a cost-effective alternative to the 35mm camera for general-purpose use yet. But in specialist corporate markets which require instant electronic images, the QV-100 is a serious contender, especially considering its presentation capabilities. The only real downside is the short battery life.