BenQ DC2110

BenQ's DC2110 is the second cheapest camera on test this month, offering 2.1 megapixels for what looks like a veritable bargain price of £142. With the same pixel count as Canon's PowerShot A40, you're looking at a maximum optical resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 before you even think about interpolation. So what's the catch? Well, for one, there's no optical zoom, whereas the A40 includes a 3x zoom.

Much more importantly, we also quickly discovered that £142 doesn't buy you much in the way of image quality. Surprisingly, given that outdoor photos are normally better than indoor ones, the outdoor shots suffered more - their overall quality, and detail capture in particular, was so poor it would make even a disposable film camera's shots look fantastic.

Indoor shots were again disappointing, though, with colour reproduction problems both with and without flash. Photographing the still life setup with the flash gave the picture a yellow tinge and severe colour fringing. Without the flash, the colours were significantly better, but the fringing was still widely visible.

At least the DC2110 is simple to use, albeit partly due to the limited controls. There's a mode selector dial on the top around the shutter button, and two small rubber buttons to select the flash mode and enable macro focusing. The macro mode isn't particularly useful, though, with a smallest area of 142 x 107mm and coloured artefacts appearing on highlights. The camera's rear holds the power switch and the menu-access buttons - one to turn on the 1.5in LCD and a four-way pad for navigating menus and playback.

As well as a basic single-shot mode, the DC2110 includes a movie mode that can shoot up to 20 seconds of 320 x 240 footage. However, it has no facility for taking bursts of images and, with a wait of around 15 seconds between single shots, you won't get another chance if you miss the action you're after.

BenQ surprised us with its memory generosity, supplying a 16MB SmartMedia card compared to the 8MB we've come to expect with budget cameras. Even at maximum quality, that's enough space for 22 photos.

But storage space isn't everything and, while £142 is certainly an attractive price for a digital camera, the BenQ DC2110 is a poor advert for the technology. If you only need a 2-megapixel camera, the Canon PowerShot A40 is a much better buy with superior overall image quality, optical zoom and continuous shooting modes.