This Camera Sure is Small... But Not Only In Size
Written: Feb 10 '03 (Updated Feb 11 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Small, Easy to Use, Cheap, Fun to Use, Bundled Software, Three Functions
Cons: OK Image Quality, No Flash, Battery Drainer, Few Features, Spoils-the-Fun Beep when Taking Pictures
The Bottom Line: If small cameras are a necessity, then deal with the image quality, but for professionals; look for other products.
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| wilburbud's Full Review: Aiptek PenCam Trio II Digital Camera |
Size Does Matter: Introduction
This camera gets all the attention, because of its size and that's probably the only attention it should get. The small size might have prevented from higher quality parts to go into it because it's image size and quality are adequate at best. The camera is good to amaze people with it's small size or take candid pictures, but for professional photos... forget it.
Image Quality
The maximum resolution is 640x480. That's OK for very amateur photographers, but the photos can be really fuzzy, especially in poor lighting. The maximum photos the camera can hold in 640x480 resolution is only 26. In 320x240, you can only do so much with an image that small, but you get a whopping 107 image capacity. The format that the camera saves the images in are in bmp format. This ensures quality, but the size can be large and this is probably why the camera can not hold much on the high quality setting. On the box it says it can "take" 1024x768 pictures, but you don't really "take" 1024x768 images. They mean resize image to 1024x768 with their software, but this further reduces image quality.
In my experience, I noticed that after taking the picture I should stay still for an additional 2 seconds to prevent any blurring or fuzziness. The camera probably take a bit to save the image into it's memory, so this step could be quite important to maximize image quality.
Features
This device can take short (I mean really short) clips of video and be a web camera too. The video camera can film for 7 seconds in high quality mode and 20 seconds for low quality.
The Web camera features works fine and the stand it comes with suits its purpose (until it breaks which mine did).
It has a USB connection to connect to your computer and the speed is decent.
Software
I had problems with the original version of the software on the included CD in Windows XP, but go to www.aiptek.com to download the latest download and it works fine. The software is only good to download you images to your computer, the other "features" are not worth using. However, the camera comes bundled with good (not great) software. One software allows 360 panorama and I had some fun using that program.
List Includes:
• Camera Manager
• Microsoft NetMeeting
• CyberLink VideoLiveMail
• ULead Photo Express S.E.
• ULead VideoStudio
• ULead Cool 360
• ULead Photo Explorer
Batteries
The camera will drain your batteries faster than you can buy them. Left in your camera, the batteries last about 4 days. I have bought new batteries, put them in and not take pictures for a couple of days. When I start to use it the batteries are already dead, without taking a single picture! With a lot of picture taking the battery life span dwindles to mere hours or days depending on usage. Also, if the batteries are removed before downloading them to your computer; the pictures are erased.
I only put the batteries in my camera when I need to take pictures and when I do, I make sure to download them to computer immediately and then remove the batteries to spare the power.
Reliability
Still works fine. No malfunctions, even when I accidentally dropped it a couple of times.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
wilburbud
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Location: Downingtown, PA, USA
Reviews written: 11
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
My interests include video games, computers, trance\techno music, break dancing, cars, bowling and skiing.
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