Cheap fun but limited practical use (Agfa ePhoto CL18)

Member Name: spider-monkey

Product:	Agfa ePhoto CL18
Date:	20/08/01 (667 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Cute, Simple to use and connect

Disadvantages: Picture quality isn't good, but for the money what do you expect?, Video facility isn't much cop, Flash is reluctant

My CL18 was bought on a whim after I received £50 of Jessops vouchers for my birthday. I'd always wanted a camera which would allow me to add small pictures to web pages quickly and easily, and this looked just the job.

The camera is cute (mine has a translucent purple body) and sits comfortably in the hand. Four tiny buttons and a small LCD in the back of the body control the limited functions (namely the flash and self-timer, and the delete facility). Functions-wise, that's it. Just point and shoot.

The bundled software is ok... I've ignored the Adobe application and used the TWAIN driver under Windows 2000 with Paint Shop Pro, with no real problems. I initially tried to install the software onto a Windows NT4 PC and failed - although I was drunk at the time and this may have affected the outcome...

The camera also comes with net conferencing software (which I haven't used) and a video capture suite. This will capture at 160x120 or 320x240 pixels, both with a sluggish frame rate on my 850MHz PIII. Picture quality is grainy, and it sometimes breaks up into an assortment of multicoloured pixels. Recording sound and video is a waste of time because the video capture is always a second or more behind the sound. The video software has a rather clumsy user interface as well.

And so to the real issue - picture quality. It can be good. Stick the camera on its supplied stand, place it on a desk and images can be reasonably sharp. For some reason fluorescent lighting brings out the best in the camera and it works really well under these conditions - even the colour balance is good.

Use the camera in low light (its first test was a pub) and you're into trouble. Either you've got a very dark and very red picture, or there's a big white spectre where the flash has caused overexposure. Finding the happy medium is practically impossible.

In medium light conditions the camera performs better, but th
is is where the camera suffers from its biggest flaw: you can't force the flash to fire. You can turn it off, but if it's on, the camera will decide if it wants to fire it. And unfortunately it's a particularly stupid camera. With conventional cameras I try not to use flash too much, but this thing almost refuses to fire. This means long exposure times, leading to camera shake (the lens is an f2, but evidently the CCD is a very slow reacting one, so any ideas about the benefits of fast lenses are sadly misplaced) and dodgy colours.

But, at the end of the day this is a £75 camera. And I haven't used any others in that price range, so I can't do a fair comparison. So when you take value for money into account it looks rather more attractive. My opinion is that they should have dumped the video facility, ditched the bundled software and put more effort into the camera's metering system and CCD. But if you want the functionality it offers and are less concerned about picture quality, it's a good buy. Personally, I was a bit disappointed, but my priorities don't match this range of the market.

Summary: