My TRUSTy Digital Camera (Trust 820 LCD Powerc@m Zoom)

Name: sandemp

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Product:	Trust 820 LCD Powerc@m Zoom
Date:	08.01.05 (479 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Easy To Use, LCD Screen

Disadvantages: Not The Prettiest Looking.

I've owned several digital camera's in my time, which I use for the sole purpose of taking family snaps. I have no need for advance functions, and all I look for is a simple interface, and the ability to transfer the pictures to my computer without any fuss. If I remember rightly my first digital camera was a Kodak creation, with the then massive picture size of 1.3 megapixels. This was the best you could get at the time, and the pictures were, well, nothing to write home about. Today you can get camera's that take pictures of up to 6 megapixels, which gives fantastic quality.

However, this camera has a now middle of the road, 4 megapixels as its top quality, which is as good as I need, and as it was purchased for a very reasonable price with lots of bundled software, it represented, for me at least, a good trade off between quality of picture and price.

In The Box
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The camera came packed with a good number of accessories, which meant it was able to be used from the word go.

These included :
* A smart leatherette pouch, for carrying it around
* A USB lead to connect it to your computer
* Leads to connect it to your television for direct viewing of pictures and stored videos.
* A set of batteries (very useful as it doesn't work without them).
* A little tripod, for when you use it as a webcam.
* A CD-ROM containing the drivers, and a simple photo editing program (ARCSoft Photo Impression)
* The instruction Manual in 9 languages, including (thank goodness) English.

The Software
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MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS

* Intel Pentium 166 MMX
* USB Port
* 32 MB of system memory (RAM)
* 150 MB Free HDD space
* CD-ROM Drive
* Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP
* Mac OS 9.1 or higher (only still camera not webcam)

The camera comes with a CD-ROM containing all necessary drivers as well as Photo Impression.

My computer was actually an Athlon 2600+ with 1024MB RAM running Windows XP, so was somewhat higher than these requirements in some ways.

I found the drivers easy to install, pop the CD into your drive and it will auto start (unless like me, you have autorun disabled, but if you've managed this you know how to browse to the installation program on the CD). Start the installation, and plug in the camera when prompted.

Photo Impression was likewise easy to install, and works very well as a basic photo editing program, you won't get fancy results, but there are some fun options. Ever fancied being a magazine model, well this program lets you get close, by inserting your face into a magazine picture.

The Camera's Styling
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The camera measures a reasonable 9.8cm x 4.5cm x 6.5cm, and has a good weight to it, so it does feel as if you are holding a real camera, rather than just a plastic shell.
Looks wise it does give the impression of being cheap, being mainly silver, with some grey plastic trim. Although this is not atheistically pleasing piece of equipment, it is certainly not the most tacky looking.

The Main Features (and what I think of them)
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4 cm LCD Screen
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I love the screen, none of my previous cameras had one of these. It is bright, and shows exactly what you are going to take a picture of. However, it does not work very well in conditions where you need a flash.

Web cam facility
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This is a very good quality web cam, however, there is no microphone, which is a bit of a let down.

4x Digital Zoom
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Another let down, digital zoom means you lose picture quality. A 2x optical zoom would have been a better choice.

Video Recording
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The camera records short video clips (without sound) at 20 frames per second, saving them in AVI format. Although they are of reasonable quality, there are three problems. Firstly, they are not a standard video format (25fps is standard for PAL), so you can't just transfer them over to your computer and use them straight away. Secondly, there is no sound, so this is not a replacement for a camcorder. Lastly, the video recording eats into your memory space at an amazing speed, and you will only get a very short clip on the internal memory.

Transfer to TV
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This is a very good idea, although one that I've not tried yet (as I have a perfectly good computer), but I imagine it would be very useful for storing your pictures onto a video tape or (if you have a DVD recorder) creating slideshow DVD's with no hassle.

Taking Pictures
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This is the camera's main function and it does this very well. It is very easy to take pictures by just pointing and clicking, without changing any settings. However, there are a number of settings you can change on the camera to improve the final result.

Picture Quality
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There are four settings for picture quality which are represented on the LCD screen by stars:

* 1.2 Megapixel (1280x960) - The lowest quality, and only really suitable for pictures you intend to upload to the web.

** 2 Megapixel (1600x1200) - An improvement, and you should be able to get reasonable small snaps from these.

*** 3 Megapixel (2048x1536) - Now we're getting towards the quality needed for larger prints.

**** 4 Megapixel (2304x1728) - The highest quality, these produce excellent photos, and I often use pictures taken at this quality as my desktop background.

Obviously, the higher the picture quality you use the fewer pictures you will be able to store.

The Flash
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This is a bog standard feature, where you can either have the flash on all the time, none of the time or on auto-flash where it will come on if the camera thinks it's needed. You can usually tell if you need the flash if the picture on the LCD screen is so dark you can't see it.

Light and White Balance Settings
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You can change the light and white balance settings, but as I was happy enough with the pictures out of the box, I left them as they were.

Viewing Your Pictures
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You can view your pictures in the following ways :

1. On the camera itself - you simply change the cameras mode to album, and you can look through your pictures, deleting those you don't like.

2. On your TV, connect the video lead to your TV, change the camera mode to album/playback and watch your pictures/videos on your TV screen.

3. On your computer, install the provided software and when you plug your camera in it becomes a removable storage device and you can peruse your photos through “My Computer”.

Battery Life
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While not fantastic, battery life is reasonable and a new set of batteries (2xAA) will last me for a day out, but I always carry an extra set just in case. There's nothing worse than having a perfect opportunity for a once in a lifetime picture and your batteries running out, is there?

Capacity
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OK, so this is the important bit, just how many pictures can you store on the camera.
Well the internal memory holds a paltry 32 pictures at the lowest quality, so we're looking at less than ten of top quality. But you can expand this with Secure digital and MMC cards. I, personally use 128MB MMC (Multimedia Memory Cards) Cards with mine which gives me over 100 pictures at the top quality, which is more than enough for my purpose.

Price and Availability
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I got my Trust 820 from Bid-up.tv at just over £100 with bundled software, but a quick look on pricerunner tells me that it is now available for the very reasonable price of 70.84 including delivery from techstore. MMC cards are available at £9.99 + delivery for 128MB from 7dayshop.

Final Words
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I love my little Trust camera, for me it's perfect. OK, it doesn't have all the features of the top range cameras, but I'm never going to need them. This camera is great for someone, who like me, just wants to take reasonable photos, and then transfer them to their computer without any hassle.

Summary: