Good for photos in natural daylight (Jenoptik Jendigital JD 12)

Member Name: milhouse

Product:	Jenoptik Jendigital JD 12
Date:	28/05/01 (330 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Small, Reasonable quality in good lighting

Disadvantages: Free Flash card too small, fiddly exposure mechanism, Poor results in bad lighting

I paid £96 for this camera, and was wary about the quality I'd get for such a low price. Overall I'm happy with the value.

The camera comes with a carry-case, batteries, a serial cable, software and a 2MB flash card.

One of the first things I had to do was buy a bigger flash card. 2MB was rarely enough capacity for more than 12-14 photos.

The software was easy to install, although being a serial connection, the pictures are quite slow to download.

The quality of the photos is more than adequate for my uses. I mainly use the camera to take photos for displaying on web pages so the resolution of 1024x768 is excellent. Obviously though without any zoom lens facility, the subject need to be in pretty close range to be visible in any great detail.

My main disappointment with this camera is the quality of photos taken with the flash. It is virtually impossible to take acceptable looking photos in dark/dull conditions. Either the picture is too bright, and facial features disappear into a a great white blob, or they are not bright enough, and skin tones become a smurf-like shade of blue.

One other more minor concern is that it occasionally seems excessively fiddly to take photos. According to the manual, you "hold the snapshot button lightly until the green light stops flashing, and then release and press the button again". Occasionally the camera seems unresponsive to this, and it is easy to miss the right shot because the camera doesn't want to take the picture.

Overall, for a digital camera at under £100, I don't regret the purchase.

Summary: