silverorange stuff

The real selling point of this camera (at least to me) was its incredible industrial design. The size of the DiMAGE is not the absolute smallest camera, but it is quite slim and easily and comfortably fits into your pocket making it easy to whip out. Despite its small size, the camera is still very easy to hold firmly in your hand with the aid of the little silver tab on the side which helps you grip it. The most eye-opening design feature of the camera is its telescoping zoom lens. Using angled mirrors that slide up and down within the body of the camera, the 3x optical zoom lens doesn't protrude outside the camera; very slick. One shortcoming of the design is the viewfinder which is almost useless because of the distortion of what you can see; though you'll usually find yourself using the screen anyway.

View Larger Image In good light, the colours can be stunning.

The user-interface of the camera is also very good. First of all, it's very fast. Switching menus and flipping between photos never stops for loading times. The menus and buttons are also quite intuitive. You can program the left-right buttons during photo taking to custom control white-balance or contrast, delete photos immediately without having to play with menus, and control the camera's settings all very quickly. Quickly reviewing images right after you take them and referencing your photo settings are all done with easy-to-read fonts and well designed hierarchal menus.

The main downside of these menu items is how the default settings are configured. My first few outings with the camera were frustrating because the default settings were so badly set. For example: by default filenames aren't unique, so every outing with the camera uses the same filenames - forcing you to save photos in different directories to keep them from overwriting each other. This can be changed deep within the settings menu, but I can't be in the minority - most people must save batches of photos together. There were several other settings like this.

View Larger Image In lower light, it takes careful setup to get things in focus.

I've been pretty impressed by the photo quality of the DiMAGE so far - but, I think there are other cameras that are better. In low-light if the camera is properly setup, or in brighter conditions, the DiMAGE can produce some stunning results. On the other hand, if you don't take time to setup a shot, the result is usually blurry or not properly lit. If you're looking for a camera that can produce stunning quick point-and-shoot photos, I'd actually recommend the Canon Power-Shot Series of cameras which several of my friends own.

The real selling points of this camera are its relatively small size and beautiful design. Picture quality is about average and the price is quite reasonable. For a more thorough technical review of the camera, see: DC Resource.