Product Reviews

The problem with digital cameras, at least the ones we normally review, is that they're expensive, fragile devices you'd never hand over to a kid without breaking into a sweat. Well, Digital Dream seems to have an answer, with a budget-friendly pair of cameras designed to be both incredibly easy to use and robust.

The two cameras, called l'elegant and la ronde, are pocket-sized silver-and-blue devices. L'elegant's design is a curvy variation on the regular rectangular camera shape, just 10cm wide by 6.5cm tall, with tiny feet to help it stand upright on a flat surface. La ronde, however, is a flat, circular object just over three inches across. Both look like uncomplicated, simple devices, which is exactly what they are.

Internally, the cameras are effectively the same, so pick which form factor you like. On the technical front, be aware that these are no match for today's expensive multi-megapixel monsters; they offer VGA-standard 640 x 480 pixel images, or 320 x 240 pixels in low-resolution (QVGA) mode. The fixed internal storage will hold 26 regular-sized or 108 low-resolution shots. There's no external memory slot for expanding this capacity and there's no LCD screen for reviewing shots.

Child's play

However, all this becomes moot when you actually start using the cameras. Yes, they are toys, but in the best sense of the word. They are perfect for giving to kids or for taking places where you'd hesitate to bring a more expensive camera.

The absence of an LCD screen contributes to the cameras' impressive battery life: la ronde takes two AAA batteries and l'elegant takes four and you can expect a few months' use from either. The cameras have fixed focus

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lenses and auto exposure, so they are true point-and-shoot devices. The image quality is reasonable given the resolution and certainly good enough for grabbing snaps for use on screen or in school projects. Shots taken in low light are likely to suffer from camera shake due to longer exposure, but this can be countered by using the amusingly small - but functional - pocket tripod supplied with each camera.

Included with each is a 3.5 x 5 inch print of a shot from one of these cameras. This shows two things: the quality a user can expect and the fact that digital images can be printed as regular photographs. Digital Dream's Web site includes a service for printing digital photos and offers l'elegant and la ronde users 12 shots as a taster.

Removal services

Getting the images from the camera proved delightfully easy - once we found the driver installer. The CD supplied with each camera was PC-only, but included the Mac installer compressed as a binhex (.hqx) file.

After we expanded and ran the installer, we found that connecting the camera via the supplied USB cable instantly prompts the user to save the camera's contents to disk, automatically date and time-stamped and numbered. Images are saved as PICT files with internal JPEG compression, and the user is asked permission to clear the camera at the end of the process - it is hard to imagine a simpler process.

What surprised us was the Continuous mode, which captures frames one after the other, at around eight a second, as long as the shutter button is held down. When downloaded, each sequence is compiled into a QuickTime movie. Sound isn't included and if done at the 'high-resolution' mode you'll only get 26 frames before running out of room, but in low-resolution mode the 108-frame capacity is enough to capture, for example, skatepark ollies and grinds in full motion glory.

These cameras don't deliver multi-megapixel resolution, but they do something equally as important. They make digital photography available to all and they make it as simple as it always should have been. For less than £70 you get a pocket-sized USB camera which takes reasonable snapshots and short QuickTime movie clips, rarely needs new batteries and downloads everything without any fuss. What more can you ask?