Agfa DSC 350 Dual Mode

For a while I have been waiting for a good quality budget megapixel digital camera with USB and no LCD to hit the market. No LCD because by eliminating the battery chomping LCD from some of these nice £300 dollar cameras and you have an affordable hi quality digital camera for around £100 and USB because it enables much faster image transfers from camera to computer than the serial port. I think such a modestly priced hi quality camera would bring ...
...and this would be a boon for the entire digital camera industry. When I read the press release for the DSC-350 I thought this could be that camera.

Unfortunately though past D-link products have proved admirable this camera is a dud. (It is possible that my camera was defective, but I am inclined to think this thing is just very limited).

The first disappointment was that this is not really a megapixel camera. The advertised ... more

For a while I have been waiting for a good quality budget megapixel digital camera with USB and no LCD to hit the market. No LCD because by eliminating the battery chomping LCD from some of these nice £300 dollar cameras and you have an affordable hi quality digital camera for around £100 and USB because it enables much faster image transfers from camera to computer than the serial port. I think such a modestly priced hi quality camera would bring a lot of average users into the digital camera world and this would be a boon for the entire digital camera industry. When I read the press release for the DSC-350 I thought this could be that camera.

Unfortunately though past D-link products have proved admirable this camera is a dud. (It is possible that my camera was defective, but I am inclined to think this thing is just very limited).

The first disappointment was that this is not really a megapixel camera. The advertised 1024 X 768 resolution is achieved through software interpolation. So the top optical (or real) resolution is only 640 x 480.

The camera is really only useful for taking outdoor shots where the image quality is pretty good. The clarity of outdoor shots is good, though the picture is a little washed out. Also, fast movement or jerky camera technique results in image smearing. Nonetheless most of my outdoor shots, which were taken on a very cloudy grey day, looked very nice.

Indoor shots however are consistently bad with digital snowy artifacts throughout every picture. Every indoor shot I took was snowy, and/or smeared. I tried intently to take a good indoor picture but was not successful once

You can also record in video mode but you have a limited amount of space and the results are color Zapruter-esque films with no sound.

In digital still mode occasionally the camera just won't take a picture, and you have to change your shot a little (a few inches left or right before it will take a shot). I don't know what the cause is. When it is working though the recycle time is pretty quick around a second. On one occasion the camera froze (would not take pictures or turn off) and the only way I was able to unfreeze it was by taking the batteries out.

The DSC-350 also works as a webcam. Hooked up to Netmeeting it performed poorly. The picture was snowy, choppy, and very delayed much worse than webcams that you can buy for less than $100. Testing the frame rates in NetShow the DSC-350 never broke 4 frames per second in any resolution. That is not good.

The ability to upload picture via USB was great and worked perfectly, and swiftly.

This camera has only one acceptable use as an outdoor only still image camera. And if that is strictly all you need then this might be a good camera to get. It has a hearty 8 meg of internal storage, close to 200 pictures at 640 x 480, is very compact, and cheap. (updated 9/5/00)

 

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