Aim-‘n’-shoot

Thisis a no frills camera from D-Link, meant for people who just want to aim andshoot. It’s small, light and comes in a transparent case. It has 4 MB FlashRAM that can hold around 140 images at a fixed resolution that can’t bechanged. It works on two AAA batteries.

Shooting a picture with this camera is pretty simple. It hasone click button, and two other buttons for power and other functions. Plus, ithas a dial to adjust the distance and focus for a long shot, close up, or evento take microscopic pictures. Interestingly, the camera doesn’t have a flash,and uses auto exposure instead. In this, the camera adjusts itself to thelighting, and flashes a green light to indicate that it’s ready.

It can be connected to a PC using its USB port, which makesits installation pretty simple. It comes with software called Photosuit III todownload images from the camera to a PC and edit them. The speed at which imagesdownload is pretty fast. It first gives all the thumbnails, after which you canchoose the image you need. We had 84 pictures on the camera, and theirthumbnails took 35 seconds to download. After this, the full images took justone minute and 15 seconds to download.

The camera has a small LCD display panel that displaysinformation like the number of pictures taken, battery level, etc. The cameragoes into sleep mode if unused for a period of time. Unfortunately, this time isquite low and can’t be adjusted. You can delete the last picture taken or allof them quite easily. The camera has a timer. It can also be used as a Webcam ora video camera, but the video quality is not very good. At its price, it’s thecheapest digital camera around.

The Camera (Rs 7,500; Dlink Mumbai; Tel: 22-6526696/6526788Fax: 6528476 E-mail: qmehra@dlink-india.com)uses auto expose, adjusting itself to lighting, etc, and flashes a green lightwhen ready

Sandeep Saxena

in Mumbai