tiny, good fun but unreliable (Sipix Stylecam Blink)

Member Name: dpg_123

Product:	Sipix Stylecam Blink
Date:	16/12/02 (138 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: small, cheap

Disadvantages: short battery life, loses pictures

It is small and very convenient - you can keep it with you at all times without it filling a pocket. It stores enough snaps in its memory for it to be useful. Photo quality isn't great but perfectly acceptable for a camera of this price/type. However there are some serious drawbacks:
1. It is unable to take pictures in anything than other than very bright conditions.
2. Photos are lost when the battery runs out - which is relatively quickly, so you need to be close to a computer at all times.
I could live with these restrictions, BUT:
3. In the one week that I seriously used the camera it froze on me twice. I had around 60 photos in memory on both occasions when it got stuck on "on" - neither the mode or shutter buttons would work. The first time it happened I wasn't able to get to a PC for an hour and in that time the camera got quite hot, the battery ran out and I lost the photos. The second time (the next day, actually, with a brand new battery) I was able to get to a PC within 10 minutes but again all pictures were lost even though the battery had not run out - I managed to take another 50 pictures over the next few days on the same battery.
I wasn't prepared to use a camera that would randomly freeze up and lose pictures so I returned it for a refund.

Summary: