I did a-lot of research before buying this camera. There are a-lot of good cameras out there for this price point. But the main selling point for me was storage. I wanted a camera that would provide me the quality and I wouldn't have to worry about running out of room. With other cameras you would have to buy additional compact flash, smart media cards, or memory stick. Even-though aforementioned memory are coming down in price, they are still rather expensive (i.e. 64mb for around $99).


So I chose the CD300. I chose it over the CD200 because of the Carl Zeiss lense and the 3.34 mp. It's worth the money if you decide to print out 8x10.

Pros:


Images - The high resolution image quality is amazing. The images are sharp, with good color saturation. At low light, the images are still crisp and clear. Macro ability works quite well, even-though it takes quite a bit of tweaking to obtain a clear image (a tripod is recommended).

Menus/Functions - Abundance of options (too many to really list) and the menu system is quite intuitive. No problems navigating through all the options especially with a jog-dial wheel. There is a one push button for manual white balance control. In

Construction - The body is well built and feels very sturdy (unlike many other cheap cameras). The LCD is quite bright and is visible in most situations. Has a bit of a problem under direct sunlight. But in reality, most LCD have the same problem. One obvious missing feature is the lack of a viewfinder. This eliminates the problem of smudging the LCD. I tend not to use the viewfinder anyway, so this wasn't a big issue for me.

Media - My main plus. Cheap, cheap, cheap. With a CDR-W, it becomes even cheaper. The camera comes with 1 CD-R and 1 CD-RW (156mb each). Theoretically, you can just use the CD-RW and never have to spend another penny on media. At the highest resolution, you can get around 80 pictures, at 1280x768 about 200 and at 640x480 about 660 images. Now that isn't bad. If you wanted to buy CD-R media, it isn't bad either. I bought 50 (185mb) for $31. Now that's a bunch of images for very cheap.

Reading/Transferring - You can pop the CD out of the camera and drop it into any CD drive and view/copy the images right away. I have heard conflicting stories about having to finalize the cd first before viewing. But I have EZ CD creator on my machine and that software allows you to view/copy without finalizing.

Cons:

Size - A bit bigger than I would have liked it. Not very heavy but it requires a bit of room to lug around. I can live with it though.

Speed - Since it is a CD writer, it takes a few seconds to write the image and become ready for the next shot. The same is true when trying to review the images on the CD. The seek times are slow. Again, a bit of any annoyance that I can live with.

Mpeg - The mpeg portion is not very good. I didn't buy the camera for this feature. Only 8 fps. The image is blurry and sound is not that clear. If this feature is important to you, I wouldn't suggest this camera.

Battery Life - Due to the access of the CD, the battery could drain quickly. Have a spare just in case. $50 investment isn't too bad.




Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 999