Rating

I like my Canon Powershot A-95, which takes really fabulous pictures, but it’s also a small heavy for me to place in my backpack for Europe, so I found this at the local BX. The excellent news: it’s lightweight (6.5 oz with batteries) and slim, and will easily fit in a pocket. It uses regular AA batteries–all the other light-weigh cameras only use rechargeable batteries, which means I would have to take along a (relatively)heavy recharger, thus defeating the purpose of buying the camera in the first place. Finally, it plugged right into my netbook and I uploaded pictures easily.

On the downside, it only uses the Sony SD stick, and the pictures are soft. Not blurry (except when you zoom in on the picture), but certainly not crisp. But, apparently all light-weight cameras have lousy picture quality, so it’s a trade-off between weight and quality. Since my pictures will mostly appear on Facebook, I guess their being soft won’t matter too much.

If picture quality matters (e.g. you’re going to make prints), you don’t want this camera. If you’re going to use the pictures on-line (blog or social-networking site), and weight is an issue, this is probably a excellent camera for you. BTW get it at Amazon–I’d have saved $20 had I done so.