Great Digital Pictures For Budget Price (Samsung Digimax 800K)

Member Name: Galloway

Product:	Samsung Digimax 800K
Date:	10/06/01 (605 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Compact, Good Pictures

Disadvantages: Only One Compression Mode, No LCD Viewer

This is the first digital camera I have bought; it is one of the cheapest ‘proper’ digital camera’s available. By ‘proper’ I mean its only a digital camera, not a web cam or movie clip cam or mp3 player, just a digital camera.

The Digimax is compact and should fit into most coat pockets easily enough and it comes with small PVC case with a belt hook for easy carrying. It also has a carry strap that fits on one corner.
Connection to a PC is done through the serial port for which a lead is supplied. Software comes on floppy disk for the TWAIN drivers, which work well with most popular image software and CD for the supplied image editor, MGI Photosuite SE.

This is a no frills camera, offering one picture resolution of 800,000 pixels, or a screen resolution of 1024x768 pixels. It also has only one digital compression ratio in jpeg format. This gives a capacity of about 13 photos on the 2MB smart card provided. Having said this the manual claims 15 photos on the provided card, but it can be replaced with appropriate cards up to 16MB.
Two photo modes are available, standard for general use and macro for photographs taken with the main object no further than 25cm from the camera lens.
There is no LCD screen here for viewing, but deletion of one or all pictures can be done from the camera. The flash has 3 modes, off, auto flash and always on and a self-timer is also included.

Picture quality is very good in natural light, maintaining natural colour and detail, but when used with the flash can give a scratchy, slightly pixelated picture. This can easily removed with smoothing or despeckle from an image editor with only a small loss of sharpness.

All in all this is a compact, easy to use digital camera that generally performs well. For a price of around £100 there isn’t much to complain about.

Summary: