Del Boy might have sold me this! (Cool i-cam)

Member Name: janharper

Product:	Cool i-cam
Date:	11/09/01 (808 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: okay if you have a computer museum

Disadvantages: really poor quality

Last week I was offered a secondhand digital camera at a computer fair. You know the type of deal, just like Del Boy would offer (Fools and Horses DelBoy, not the Dooyoo one!)

The camera was said to be two years old and an absolute snip of a bargain at £50. It had cost £150 new and the owner had apparently found it an excellent piece of equipment but had decided to upgrade (or so the stallholder said).

I parted with £45 in the finish and thought I had a bargain. Unfortunately that wasn't so.

The Digital Camera was a VDC 300 bought originally from Swaffham Computer Supplies. It was very easy to operate and although it came with no frills it did have an LCD screen and a viewfinder. There were different compression settings to allow you to store more pictures and 2mb of built in memory.

The lead connecting camera to pc and the software was really easy to install. I was still delighted by my bargain buy at this point.

However, when I did eventually view my pictures I was horrified at the quality. I thought I had perhaps made a mistake but no, that was the best I was going to get. The colours were all washed out and the resloution was poor.

I printed out a sample couple of pictures and the resulting photos were grainy and extremely pale in colour. The printed resolution was so bad that it was almost impossible to make out the features of any people in them.

The point I'm trying to make here is that it isn't worth buying a two year old digital camera. The technology has improved so much in recent months that this camera is, quite honestly, no longer of any use. I would have been better off buying a standard camera and scanning my photographs into my PC.

Computer hardware goes obsolete and out of date so quickly that its always best to check carefully before buying used equipment. In the case of a digital camera, it is positively archaic after two years, but something like monitor may not
be.

Take care that any secondhand hardware isn't so far out of date that it really isn't worth having.

Del Boy would have been proud of the guy who sold me this piece of computer history. I am now saving up to buy an up to date digital camera as the technology has advanced so much in the past two years and I have been told that I can expect far superior quality.

Summary: