Good but flawed (Philips ESP80)

Name: Nibelung

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Product:	Philips ESP80
Date:	18.01.01 (364 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Convenient with good picture quality

Disadvantages: No optical v/finder. Charging batteries abroad is a pain

I have owned a Philips ESP-80 for about 18 months. Therefore it is out-of-date! At least it must be, surely? With the rate at which things improve in this field, what was state-of-the-art then, i.e. a 1.3 megapixel camera, is more or less entry-level now, but still well above webcams in definition.

To a certain extent, the fact that 3.3 megapixel cameras are now available does not detract too much from my Philips.

Firstly, I only paid £176 for it from a Tandy catalogue sale, and you would still be hard put to it, to find a “1.3” camera today at that price.

Secondly, “3.3” is all very well, but you need some sizeable storage to take advantage of the high definition.

Thirdly, there’s no use having a camera of the latter’s quality if your printer’s crap. You need to view camera and printer as an entity.

At 4”x 6” postcard size, my Philips takes perfectly good pictures which are hard to differentiate from a “real” photo at its “VGA” quality, which is a step down from its best, and gives me 24 shots on a 8mb Smart Media disk (these are now quite cheap, so have more than one handy). My printer is an Epson with 1440dpi capacity, so the printer is not an issue here. Even A4 shots are reasonable but really need to have the benefit of full definition.

I found a good way to test the optimum definition. I took exactly the same indoor close-up shot in all six definitions and printed them all out on a high quality office laser (I’m not wasting ink and “best glossy” on a trial like that!). It was from this that I concluded that VGA was good enough, being practically indiscernible from SVGA at A4 – after all, not many people have access to a larger printer.

The Philips is an unusual design of camera having a swivelling lens section, which can be turn through about 180 degrees from looking forwards through vertical to se
lf-portrait. This has proved useful when trying to take pictures from anywhere other than eye-level. For example, the vertical setting allows it to be used as a waist-level camera. The flash follows this swivelling action until the vertical is reached, beyond which it can’t go. Turn back past the vertical, and the picture switches over, so that self-portraits are the right way up.

This swivel feature is not only the camera’s selling point, but also its disadvantage rolled into one! What seemed like a good idea prevents it from having an optical viewfinder in the camera body. This means that you are always squandering precious battery life to take photos. Also, its use as a genuine camera-replacement on holiday is marred by the fact that the LCD screen easily loses the battle with sunlight, even with the brightness turned right up. You find yourself shielding it like an old fashioned camera with a waist-level viewfinder.

It is an easy camera to hold, with the battery box forming a right-hand grip. The case is mainly metal-clad which gives it an air of quality. It is easy to use, with a main features dial for Record, Macro Record, Play, Erase and Connect to PC. The motorised zoom is a genuine optical affair.

I was pleased to see that it was provided with full set of NiMh batteries instead of NiCads. Less pleasing is the charger, which is built into a UK plug, the weight of which makes it difficult to keep in the socket when over-plugged onto a continental or US adapter. You CAN run in on 4 x AA batteries, but these start costing more than film!

Although it comes complete with all the leads and software you need to connect it to a PC for downloading purposes, there is one flaw in this set-up. You get home, bursting to look at the scoop of the century, so what do you have to do first? – re-charge the batteries which you have run down during the course of the day, (unless of course you want to go out and buy a separa
te mains unit to run the camera – the charger won’t do it).

Much more convenient is the floppy-disk adapter for Smart Media cards (mine’s a Fuji). All you do is remove the media chip from the camera, insert it in the adapter, ET VOILA, a floppy disk full of jpeg files. I would recommend one of these to anyone with a digital camera, and they are available for Memory Sticks (Sony) as well.

You may also find this camera badged as a Ricoh, or is it a Ricoh badged as a Philips. Who knows?

This is my only real experience of digital cameras, and I suspect that some of my niggles, like LCD screen versus sunlight are common in others.

Verdict? Must try harder. I shan’t be throwing my Canon IXUS or my old Nikon F away just yet! When they come up with a digital camera that is:-

a) capable of taking interchangeable lenses from a major manufacturer and

b) is AFFORDABLE,

I’ll think again.

Summary: