Looks great in both design and the picture quality.
Written: Jul 01 '00 (Updated Oct 02 '00)
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Pros: Easy to use. Great range of settings for the flash, the resolution and the focal length. The camera itself looks pretty darn cool too.
Cons: The camera I have can only be connected to your computer via a serial port, and as I have a serial mouse and a serial modem, I have no spare ports while online, forcing me to disconnect to upload new pictures. :-( [Update: I now have a PS/2 mouse and can p
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| mythor's Full Review: Agfa ePhoto 780 Digital Camera |
I bought this great little camera for myself for christmas, and it's impressed me from day one.
The camera itself looks very cool, with a nice metallic blue being the main color of the camera, as well as having very sleek lines and edges. Despite being very 'smooth' it fits into your hands well, and never feels like slipping, unlike other cameras I've used previously. In size, it's comparable to a 'normal' camera, so it doesn't feel awkward to use. The construction also seems to be very durable, but to be honest, I've been far too careful with it to have dropped it, so I'm not sure it's unbreakable, but it seems fairly solid.
Using it to take pictures (what else?) is a fairly simple procedure, as its main function is the typical "point-and-shoot" style of operation. It has a number of different flash settings, including an "auto-detect" mode, which works fairly well, although it does perhaps use the flash a little too often. There's also a red-eye reduction mode, which I've not really had much use for so far, as the standard flash usually doesn't give too much of a red eye effect, if at all. It also has a forced flash, and forced no flash mode, which are the two more common settings I use. But in any case, it's a digital image, so you can always doctor the picture later, to brighten the image, or remove the red gleam in eyes, which can make for a whole world of fun in itself!
As well as variable flash settings, you can also alter the 'focal length', which for us non-techie camera people means you can take pictures of stuff up real close without it going fuzzy, and you can take pictures of stuff far away without them being fuzzy! From what I've seen of this, it works well too. I've taken some extreme closeup pictures of flowers to use as greeting cards on my website, and the Agfa produces a nice high quality shot for me each time. I've also used it to take pictures at parties, and the clarity is perfect every time - so long as I'm not having so much fun that I forget to check the focal setting! ;-)
Another variable setting is the actual picture quality. You get 4 modes to play with, but if you're like me you'll usually only use 2 (or maybe 3) of them - Super high res mode (1024x768) and low res mode (320x240), and occasionally the "standard" VGA mode which is the second lowest setting, and gives an image 640x480 pixels in dimension. I seem to rarely use the mode below the highest setting, I guess partly due to preferring to either take a lot of pictures (at either of the low res modes) or just a couple if I'm using the high resolution setting, usually when I know I'll be able to offload the images to a computer before running out of shots.
But no matter which setting you choose, the images come out very clear, so long as you have a steady camera hand of course!
The software provided with the camera is adequate for the purposes of getting the images off the camera, but if you're serious about doing any manipulation of your images, like removing red-eye problems, removing background stuff that you don't want, or even people you don't want! etc, then you'd be better off getting something like PaintShop Pro to edit your images with.
One function I do find quite handy is the ability to display images from the camera directly on a TV screen. The pictures still come up pretty clear, and they're way bigger than the little LCD screen on the back of the camera (which you can also use 'live' as a viewfinder to get the perfect shot first time). The advantage of this also is that you don't need to have access to a computer to be able to view the larger versions of your photos, you can do it anywhere there's a TV set. Especially handy at parties! It's also handy while away on holidays, so you can delete pictures you decide you don't want to keep at the end of each days activities. A better option would be to have a laptop on holiday with you, but that's obviously a little on the expensive side!
The cameras storage is provided by "Smart Media" memory cards, which I believe are a pretty standard item. I've seen them available in various stores, although they are mostly too expensive for me to consider buying an extra card, or were when I last checked at least. It would make a good purchase if you intend on taking a lot of pictures, or a reasonable number of high quality pictures, as you can easily swap cards anytime you want. The cards themselves are unbelievably tiny. I kid you not when I say that these things are thinner than a credit card, and are also about half as big, surface wise. They don't seem to be too brittle, but care should be taken when handling them - they ain't exactly cheap!
The standard card that comes with the camera is meant to be a 2MB card I believe, but as I had to do a bit of ringing around to actually find this particular model of camera (my research suggested this was the best camera in the price range I could afford), I actually ended up with a camera that had been opened once to demonstrate to a customer the functions the camera provided. I was told that it'd only been opened the one time, and then repacked, so I had no problem accepting this offer. What they didn't tell me was that the salesman who had demonstrated the camera to the customer had accidentally left a lovely 4MB Smart Media card in the camera upon repacking it, instead of replacing the 2MB card. I certainly wasn't going to complain about the doubled storage capacity! ;-D
Connection to your PC is provided via a serial cable (I believe an Apple Mac cable is also available - unsure as to availability of a USB cable, but suspect one doesn't exist, as the camera predates USB technology to the best of my knowledge). This can be a hassle if you have a serial mouse and a serial modem, as I did when I originally purchased the camera. Because of this problem, I originally could not be connected to the net and upload pictures at the same time, I had to disconnect the modem and plug in the camera instead.
When my PC's motherboard died, however, I got the repairman to install a PS/2 mouse connector (a different sort of mouse connection method for the less technically minded), so that I would have a spare serial port available to connect the camera to. If you have a USB modem or mouse, you will also most likely have a spare serial port. If not, then you may have the problem of having to swap the modem and camera around in order to upload your photos, which can be somewhat annoying. And don't think you can get around it by unplugging your mouse either - Windows reeeeeeally doesn't like you doing that. ;-)
Overall, the Agfa ePhoto 780c performs extremely well, and I can highly recommend it to anyone looking into buying a digital camera. It's probably come down a bit in price since I purchased it, but it still performs quite well, and will likely be more than adequate for your needs!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
mythor
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Member: Matthew Sharpe
Location: Sydney, Australia
Reviews written: 77
Trusted by: 47 members
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