The spy (cam) that jilted me (Digital Dream l'espion)

Member Name: Plymyphil

Product:	Digital Dream l'espion
Date:	14/11/03 (784 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Small, Cheap, Gadget

Disadvantages: Cheap, Image quality, Windows XP no no

The L'espion is a gadget lover's dream for three reasons.

1: It is tiny and rekindles memories of making spy devices out of toilet roll tubes as a youngster - come on ... we all did it ... didn't we?

2: It has a genuine purpose, in this case, digital camera and web cam combined.

3: It is cheap. This last one is very important as most gadget fiends I know have a partner who fails to share their enthusiasm for the weird and wacky world of electronic wizardry. As a purchaser in this position it makes for an easier life if you can deliver the line "...but darling ... it only costs (sniff) ... a paltry £39.99".

Let's take a look at how the L'espion delivers the excitement and innovation that gets the pulse of gadget lovers racing.

THE DESIGN
OK, you can fit this in any pocket. It is tiny. Slightly thinner and shorter than a matchbox but a little wider. It is incredibly light and really is a go anywhere digital camera. The viewfinder is a little plastic screen that is manually slid up from the top of the camera. It is reasonably accurate in viewing the photograph taken but by no means perfect. The camera looks cheap and will not win many cool awards as you struggle to get a finger nail in to slide up the viewfinder. That said, your gadget buddies will find it cool that apart from some mobile phones with integral cameras, this is just about the smallest digital camera on the market.

THE PRICE
Now, value for money here is undeniable. There is however one proviso to this and you must read on to discover the eventuality that renders this camera poor value for money for indeed there is one. I paid £39.99 but they are loads cheaper now and although it was repackaged I'm sure I saw this camera in a budget book shop for £19.99 the other day.

FEATURES
This is a stills camera, a web camera and when connected to your PC can even make digital movies. There is no flash so expec
t pictures to look slightly brown and grainy unless taken with the sun behind you, outside on a pleasant day. I'm not exaggerating here, this is the only situation under which the picture will be even barely reasonable in terms of colour saturation but again, just keep telling yourself ... "it's cheap and very small" and you might feel like the image quality is acceptable. As a web cam I found it fine. The digital video creation software is also quite good fun and let's you prepare video cards with appropriate surrounds and even add text to the video before exporting to .avi format for sending to friends or loading to your web site. Images are at two resolutions. Firstly there is the barely adequate 640X480. At this resolution the camera can store 20 images. Secondly there is the rather useless half size which on any reasonable monitor looks like an animated icon. The only advantage of this is 40 images over the usual 20.

BATTERY LIFE
This is a real biggy when buying digital cameras and this has by far the best battery life of any digital camera I have ever used, and I've used a few! The single AAA battery will keep going for quite literally hundreds of shots. I suppose this is mainly because of the lack of LCD screen which suck the life out of batteries in seconds on other cameras. Also, the memory is not a card format but internal. This is good for battery life but obviously poor for folks wanting lots of images as you have to keep downloading to the PC.

THE PROBLEM
Ignore any claims ... this baby just will not work with XP in any meaningful way. On my current XP machine as soon as the camera is connected it shuts the machine down. Now, I have tried on a variety of machines and no success to date. So, If you have XP don't buy one and if you upgrade to XP, gift the camera to a less technically up to date friend. It's a great shame because if you're like me you had just begun to get used to the niggles
the camera has (like losing it's memory for no apparant reason) and then it's gone to your friend.

OVERALL
If you don't like gadgets, don't even consider this ... it really isn't that smart a camera. If you like gadgets get this at the cheapest price you can and expect to use it death for the first few weeks, delighted at the size. Once the fact that it is very small has worn off, you will start reflecting slightly more critically on the poor images, the inability to take pictures in doors without them looking like they've been stained with coffee and the fact that now you've upgraded to Windows XP, the camera doesn't seem to like you at all.

Me, I'm off to see if I can make a better spy cam using toilet roll tubes and a broken mirror - mine may not take pictures but hey ... I can see round corners now.

Have fun and thanks for reading the opinion.

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