When I finally decided to buy a digital camera, I was surprised at the selection I had. There were so many brands with so many models, it was a bit confusing. But a friend told me to look for Intel's Pocket PC Camera. After checking on some of the stats I took his advice and bought it myself. Let me tell you why.
Intel bills this as a web camera, that's the section of the store I found it in. But in all retrospects it's really a digital camera. Firstly it's easily connected to your computer, only one cord and a short program installation. At that point there are a number of things you can do. It is a good web camera though, as it captures a decent amount of frames per second. But to discover the real potential of this item, you must unplug it from your computer.
Unlike most web cameras, this one is portable. When taking it around you have a few options of how you want to take pictures. You can take standard, high quality, a 5-picture snapshot, an 8-second timer, or you can film movies. The movie aspect is something that is a bit deceiving though. You can't actually record long events as you can only take movies for 8 seconds and the camera can hold 10 of these. And while the camera is portable there is no sound recorder, so you're clips are silent. Oh yes I should mention that the camera takes little power to run when portable, so battery life is long.
The camera holds something like 256 normal snapshots, 128 high quality ones, 10 8-second movies, or any combinations. Once you plug your camera back in, all you do is open the program and download your pictures. The download time is usually fast, unless you have more than 100 pictures as that really drags it. Also movies load slowly so don't expect a 2-second load. Anyway, after you save the photos you want, you can simply delete the unwanted ones. No expensive memory cards, no short camera memory, it's really just a few simple clicks.
Of course after you download you can crop your picture with one of the programs you get with the CD. But aside from that, there are a variety of other things you can do while your camera is connected to your computer. There's the scene recorder, which WILL let you take movies as long as you want with sound included. Only problem to that is this is not technically a digital camera, and filming while moving the camera doesn't always bring the best results. But you can also use the other programs included (You get about 6 different programs in one really, 250 megabytes total) to view snapshots before you take them. There's even an area to play games with your camera, which like the microphone I've never really figured out how to do. Then again I haven't been to anxious to try.
Now about the quality. I'll be honest, this camera takes pictures not even close to quality as Kodak Max film. If I had to measure it with a film, I'd say it's along the lines of Kodak 200. No that's not the best you can get, but it's really an economy picture for an economy camera. Taking pictures of landscapes or large objects isn't much of a problem, but when you want to get close-up details you might find some difficulty. All things considered, the other great features (and price) make of for the lower quality pictures.
Oh yes, now we come to the price. I called this an economy camera for a reason. Intel was pretty smart when they made this camera. They designed the whole package as a perfect way to introduce digital cameras to people who otherwise wouldn't have considered buying one. How did they do that? They priced it at $130, the lowest price for a digital camera there is. They also give you a $30 rebate, making this a very good buy. Since Intel was able to mass-produce these little things they can make the price so low, and from what I've heard it's worked.
So you get a camera with lots of options, decent picture quality, easy to use software, simple hardware, and a very low price all in the Intel Pocket PC. I recommend this to people who thought they couldn't afford a digital camera or didn't need one. Just think of how much money you pay to buy film and get it developed. For me it's already paid for itself for the amount of pictures I've taken. Message to Intel: Great camera!
Takes both photo and video images 640 x 480 maximum resolution 16.8 million colors 8 MB flash memory Up to 30 frames per second in full-motion video, ...More at Amazon Marketplace
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