|
When I saw this camera for $19.95 at a local pharmacy my
curiosity got the better of me and I had to see what sort of pictures it
makes. Made by Sakar International, Inc., this Digital Concepts Series
98379 is about 3 1/4" x 2 1/4" in size, has a resolution of 640 x 480, and enough internal memory to hold 79
pictures. It uses 2 AAA batteries and the batteries are required to
hold the pictures in memory. Remove the batteries and the pictures are
gone. It includes a nice software package and pictures are downloaded
to a PC via a USB cable.
The image quality is astoundingly poor by today's standards, yet there is
something charming about the pictures. They look like they've been
Photoshopped to look like impressionistic paintings. There are no
focus or exposure controls. The focal length seems long for a
small fixed lens camera, at least 50mm equivalent. The aperture is fixed at
f/2.6 yet the depth of field zone begins around 2 ft, so the sensor must be
extremely tiny. Color fidelity is very good, and it does a good
job on exposure, both indoors and out in bright
sunlight, so it must have a wide range of shutter speeds. There is no
half-press trigger position to lock in exposure, so there really is no
control of any sort.
The optical viewfinder shows you more image than you get and most is cut off
the bottom, so you learn to put liberal space around the subject and aim a
bit low. The playback view screen is horrible and is of little use
other than seeing if you got close to what you were pointing at and deciding
whether to save or delete captured images. It's not the same
proportion as the sensor so it's worse than the viewfinder for composing. There
is no chimping enjoyment with this one.
These two photos of the camera were taken with a small Casio pocket camera.
The following 17 pictures from the Sakar are unprocessed, straight from the
camera (except the first two which were changed to B&W in Photoshop).
|
