Kyocera Finecam S3r > Reviews > Say Cheese

Author's product rating:   

Picture Quality	Excellent
Range & Quality of Features	Excellent
Ease of Use	Easy
Overall Look & Design	Satisfactory
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	This is a small, lightweight, easy to use camera
Disadvantages:	Camera accessories are difficult to find .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I've been looking for a good digital camera for years. Being a gadget lover I knew that digital was the way forward. So like most people I started out with all the big names in both photography and computer equipment including Kodak and Hewlett Packard. None of the camera's I tried gave me the same results that I could achieve with my analogue camera. Until I tried the Kyocera Finecam S3R.

I'd never heard of Kyocera before so I was a bit hesitant when buying it. Reading the packaging it sounded like my dream camera. It was reasonablly priced, I paid £120 from a local electrical dealer. So I thought I'd give it a go.

One of the big advantages to me, some of you might not care about this, was the rechargeable battery. I'd spend up to £10 on batteries every time I wanted to use my camera. If any of you have used digital cameras before then you'll know what these things are like with the power. Rechargeable batteries don't always have the guts to keep your camera going past 20 minutes and disposable batteries are expensive. This thing was great! Plug it in for 2 or 3 hours before you go and you're set. The battery actually lasted a fair bit longer than any disposables too.

Actually using the camera was so easy too. This is an ideal camera for a beginner. You have 3 main modes for capturing images. Still images, continuous images and movie images. I use mainly still and movies.

The continuous mode was a bit of a disappointment. It takes a still photograph every 0.5 seconds. I thought it would've been useful for capturing a good picture of something that was moving. I found though that the pictures came out blurry, it's not a feature I use often.

Movie images are pretty similar to using a camcorder. It's really easy to use, just point and shoot. The zoom functions are the same as taking normal pictures. There's only a little mic on the camera though so sound quality isn't great. Picture quality, however is excellent.

Still pictures are where this camera comes into its own. I mainly use my camera for taking pictures at live music events so it's usually pretty dark with lots of flashing lights. Not the ideal place to take photos but this camera copes with it remarkably well. I'm not a photographer so I don't know all the in's and out's of lighting balance and exposure. I just want to point my camera and press a button. This camera lets me do that, but if you do want to tinker with it's lighting settings, perhaps setting them a little higher or lower depending on whether you are in darkness or bright sun light this camera will let you do that. As well as adjusting the colour mode, chroma and sharpness

The zoom function is within easy reach. It's has both digital and optical zoom (!.3x, 1.6x, 2.0x and 2.8x), as well as macro and landscape modes for picture taking. It has has the option to let you choose your own picture size, and pixel resolution.

This is a great camera for a beginner or intermediate photographer, generally easy to use and packed with more features than you'll ever need. If I can use it in the dark, it can't be that bad!