Toshiba PDR-T30

A table of all the full digital images taken with the cameras

The PDR-T30 represents a big departure from the firm's previous digital camera designs we've seen at PC Pro and is unique in having a touch-screen LCD. Not that we could find a good reason for it being there - the five-way navigation pad is arguably easier to use when navigating menus.

Gimmicks aside, the PDR-T30 is compact and sturdily built thanks to an all-metal case. Toshiba supplies a garish green carry case and a sparkly plastic neck strap, both of which detract from the otherwise tasteful design. Also included are a rechargeable lithium ion battery and a 16MB SD card.

Perhaps due to its compactness, there's only a 2x optical zoom, but the 3.34-megapixel CCD is par for the course in this test. A sliding door, rather like the Olympus Camedia's, protects the lens but doesn't act as a power switch. This is a missed opportunity, and note that power-on time is slow at 5.4 seconds. Disappointingly, there's no optical viewfinder or tripod thread - the latter being a particularly frustrating omission since the base of the camera is curved.

Unlike other cameras, the PDR-T30 doesn't even pretend to have a manual mode - almost every function is automatically controlled bar white balance, which has four presets if the automatic mode fails. You can also manually select ISO from 100, 200 or 400 settings. There's a basic continuous mode, which saves 16 frames as a single image, and movies can be shot at 320 x 240 with no audio.

When scrutinising images, we found that the PDR-T30 generally produced acceptable snapshots but quality was second poorest overall. Our indoor scene with flash was underexposed and fairly noisy, while the same scene without flash was overexposed, noisy and exhibited a similarly poor level of resolution and detail capture. An area of 77 x 58mm was rather large for the macro shot and focus was noticeably poor in the corners. Thankfully, barrel distortion was acceptable for a lens this small.

Outdoors, the 2x zoom prevented the Toshiba scoring well on our BT Tower shot, where detail capture was poor compared with the Nikon Coolpix 3100. The portrait shot was well exposed, but colours were undersaturated and skin tones became slightly jaundiced. In general testing, the PDR-T30 struggled with highlights and shadows, burning out whites - especially when using the flash indoors.

Overall, Toshiba has left too many features out of the PDR-T30 and included too many novelty ones. While it excels at taking general snapshots, there are better choices.

A table of all the full digital images taken with the cameras