Product Reviews

Competition for the heavyweight title in the digital camera arena has become heated recently. At the moment the Olympus C-840L (reviewed issue 47, p167) reigns supreme as the best digital camera at the quality end of the market, boasting excellent picture quality, a stack of useful features and a mega-pixel CCD. This sort of specification is by no means unique to Olympus, however: the Nikon Coolpix 900 (reviewed issue 48, 164), for example, produces image quality that's nigh on indistinguishable from that of the C-840L. There are other challengers too, in the form of the ungainly, yet effective, Agfa ePhoto 1680 (reviewed issue 50, p133) and the Kodak DC260 (reviewed issue 50, p142). Now Casio has entered the mega-pixel business with the QV-7000SX.

First impressions of the QV-7000SX on the feature front are impressive. The new Casio boasts a 1.32 million pixel CCD, a 2x true optical zoom and an 8Mb CompactFlash card as standard. On the ergonomic side of things, however, things aren't so positive. The design and styling of the QV-7000SX failed to convince me. The camera employs a jointed and rotatable body similar to the Coolpix 900 and Agfa ePhoto 1680. This locates the lens, flash, metering and autofocus apparatus in an independently rotatable module on the left of the camera body, allowing you to accurately frame top-down shots without climbing up a ladder, for example, and making taking self portraits a cinch. Thanks to solid design and execution on the part of Nikon, this was a feature that was a real bonus. On the Casio, however, it turns out to be more of an annoyance than a help. The lens and flash module of the Casio was so small that I found it easy to obscure the lens with my fingers.

Having to keep your fingers out of the way also makes holding the camera uncomfortable. And, at the other end of the camera, you'll also need to place your fingers carefully. With the small rocker switch for the zoom, the shutter button, a rotating mode selector, the power on and off switch, a menu button and two more keys all placed in close proximity to each other, it can be a bit of a struggle to remember which to push when you're concentrating on a shot. To help frame your picture, the Casio goes some way to compensating for these ergonomic problems with a comparatively large 2.5in high-resolution LCD. But this too had its problems. I found that the screen's extremely slow refresh rate made settling

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on an image difficult, and when I attempted to capture fast moving subjects the screen turned into blur.

To make things worse, there's no proper optical viewfinder to use as an alternative when the stuttering screen refresh becomes annoying. This makes taking shots in the dark far more difficult than it should be and, even with the night photography mode activated, the murky, muddy-brown images that appear on the screen are a far cry from the final, captured images.

On the positive side, the Casio appears to be a highly capable camera that's able to differentiate well between colours and similar shades. Taking the camera to a park and snapping scenes of autumnal trees and banks of grass revealed the QV-7000SX was able to capture thin black branch details against a bright sky with remarkable fidelity. On the downside, however, the grass looked a little over-coloured and on the synthetic side.

Comparing quality with the Olympus Camedia C-840L, I was impressed with how well the Casio matched up to the currently A Listed product. I found the Camedia to be capable of a slightly wider range of subtly different colours. Details were marginally better on the Olympus too, which produced pictures slightly sharper and less pixelated when a reference point was examined using Photoshop's zoom function. The same can be said of the Kodak DC260, which also manages a slight colour representation advantage over the Casio and minor detail improvements. As I've already said though, the differences are small.

When you've captured and stored your images, there are a number of ways to retrieve them from the QV-7000SX. For the more adventurous, the camera sports an infrared port and there's also an optional CompactFlash card to PC Card adaptor which costs £13. The simplest and most straightforward means of communication should, of course, be the standard serial cable link between PC and camera. Here, however, the Casio lets itself down with some poorly conceived communication software.

Using version 2.6E of the QV-LINK application, the latest according to Casio, I failed to get any type of connection established between camera and PC. I fiddled with baud rates, changed port settings, explored the help file for any clues and even tried the same process on other PCs, but all to no avail.

I finally managed to retrieve my images from the same PC using Casio's TWAIN software. This, to add insult to injury, didn't come as standard on the software CD and I had to download it from Casio's Web site.

There's little to separate the DC260, the C-840L and the QV-7000SX in terms of raw image quality. Ultimately, what really counts against the Casio are its ergonomics and poor PC connectivity. I found using the QV-7000SX difficult and uncomfortable, and, to make things worse, retrieving captured images was unnecessarily awkward. So, despite its reasonable price tag of just £426, the QV-7000SX can't rob the Olympus C-840L of its crown as the king of digital cameras.