Product Reviews

Digital photographs are an excellent way of recording special events, but until you hook the camera up to a PC the photos are locked inside. Most digital cameras have a small LCD on the back to help you frame the photo, but these low-resolution screens are of limited use for viewing your photos as they lack detail. Epson's L-500V bucks that trend.

The 2.5" screen has a pixel density of 256 pixels per inch (ppi), giving a resolution of 512x384. This is more than twice the detail provided by an average desktop LCD screen, which has at most 100ppi. It makes a real difference,

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and pictures viewed on the camera look strong, with excellent contrast and more detail than we are used to seeing from a camera screen.

However, in terms of picture quality the L-500V lags behind its 5-megapixel competition. Despite the 2,560x1,920 recorded resolution, shots are not particularly sharp and it struggles to gauge exposure correctly. It provides indoor and outdoor exposure modes and manual EV compensation, which helps a little, but we expect better from a £230 digital camera. Colours tend to be realistic rather than vividly recorded, but high-contrast areas exhibit annoying purple outlining.

The large screen makes the camera itself rather large, but it weighs just 190g. A track-point is used to navigate menus and select macro, flash, self-timer and exposure settings. This falls naturally under your right thumb, so it's too easy to change the mode inadvertently when taking a photo, which is a particularly frustrating design flaw.

Epson has neatly combined two functions - a camera and picture viewer - in one device with the L-500V. Sadly, the relationship is less than equal and it's clear that the camera is the lesser partner.