Reviews Written By: A9DYWY9VOSP1Pprovided by Amazon.com |
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 | Lowepro Edit 110 Camcorder Bag - Black | |
 | "Excellent value" | 2008-09-10 |
| I use this bag to carry a superzoom camera. The camera is held securely -- no wiggle room, but it is still easy to get it out of the bag. There is adequate room for extra batteries and memory cards, plus a few small odds and ends -- and that's all I need. The quality of construction is good. They use lightweight materials, so the bag doesn't add much weight of its own. The only downside is that I would have liked a wider shoulder strap or a perhaps a shoulder pad. But comparable bags, especially in stores, cost a great deal more. | ||
 | Fujifilm Finepix S700 7.1MP Digital Camera with 10x Optical Zoom | |
| "Excellent value" | 2008-05-01 |
| I just got my S700 and it seems to perform very well. It doesn't match the power of my Panasonic FZ8, which can take more pictures in a burst, and which zooms a bit farther (12x versus 10x). The S700 also uses AA batteries instead of lithium, and I'm really sold on lithium. But I've started using Sanyo Eneloop NiMH AAs, and they seem to hold their charge reasonably well if not quite as well as most lithium batteries. The photos and videos are a close match in quality, and one should add that the Pansonic doesn't zoom during video, while the Fuji does. The bottom line, though, is that the Fuji is roughly $100 less expensive (depending on the deals available), a concern for me since I may buy more of them as Xmas gifts. | ||
 | Casio Exilim EX-S600 6MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom (Silver) | |
| "Very useful camera" | 2007-05-16 |
| I have owned several digital cameras. This Casio EXS600 is my eighth, and it is the most useful one so far. It isn't just that the camera is small, so that I can carry it around all the time. Picture quality is excellent, with sharp images and rich but not unrealistic saturation. The video mode is efficient, producing artifact-free (as far as I can see) videos in relatively little card space (my two Canon cameras yield video of equal quality but use four times as much memory space). The anti-shake feature, while it may not be the best technology (they move the CCD instead of variably bending light in the lens), seems to work. I've gotten hand-held overhead shots in low-light at 1/40 of a second that were quite sharp. There is also an ISO 1600 setting for extreme situations, but results are grainy. Battery life is excellent -- I have taken as many as 150 pictures and several videos in a day and have never seen the indicator fall below 3 bars (out of 3). I like the "past movie" mode, with which you can set it to take videos continuously but keep only the last 8 seconds of activity that occurred before you pressed the button to begin. I know this sounds confusing, but here is an example. I pointed the camara at a rooster and waited for it to crow -- after it did I pressed the movie button to turn the video mode on. When I viewed the video it turned out that I had captured the full crow. This mode is also useful for capturing something that my grandchildren are doing sporadically. There are a few downsides. The cradle is fine for home use but not for travelling. When travelling I use a card reader to feed photos to my laptop and an aftermarket battery charger to charge the battery (Amazon lists many chargers, some that come with spare batteries, for the NP-20 battery). The camera has an instant-on feature that was annoying -- it would turn on in my pocket when the button was pressed lightly accidentally. But it was a menu-selectable item and I turned it off. The flash takes a few seconds to recharge for the next photo when you've taken a photo that demanded full flash energy (a distant subject), and it won't let you switch to viewing photos while that is going on. But the flash is stronger than the ones on my Canon cameras. Overall, the negatives are minor. This is a great camera. You might be able to find it at a reduced price -- the Casio web site no longer lists information on it, which suggests they are phasing it out. | ||
 | Casio Exilim EX-S600 6MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom (Blue) | |
| "Very useful camera" | 2007-05-16 |
| I have owned several digital cameras. This Casio EXS600 is my eighth, and it is the most useful one so far. It isn't just that the camera is small, so that I can carry it around all the time. Picture quality is excellent, with sharp images and rich but not unrealistic saturation. The video mode is efficient, producing artifact-free (as far as I can see) videos in relatively little card space (my two Canon cameras yield video of equal quality but use four times as much memory space). The anti-shake feature, while it may not be the best technology (they move the CCD instead of variably bending light in the lens), seems to work. I've gotten hand-held overhead shots in low-light at 1/40 of a second that were quite sharp. There is also an ISO 1600 setting for extreme situations, but results are grainy. Battery life is excellent -- I have taken as many as 150 pictures and several videos in a day and have never seen the indicator fall below 3 bars (out of 3). I like the "past movie" mode, with which you can set it to take videos continuously but keep only the last 8 seconds of activity that occurred before you pressed the button to begin. I know this sounds confusing, but here is an example. I pointed the camara at a rooster and waited for it to crow -- after it did I pressed the movie button to turn the video mode on. When I viewed the video it turned out that I had captured the full crow. This mode is also useful for capturing something that my grandchildren are doing sporadically. There are a few downsides. The cradle is fine for home use but not for travelling. When travelling I use a card reader to feed photos to my laptop and an aftermarket battery charger to charge the battery (Amazon lists many chargers, some that come with spare batteries, for the NP-20 battery). The camera has an instant-on feature that was annoying -- it would turn on in my pocket when the button was pressed lightly accidentally. But it was a menu-selectable item and I turned it off. The flash takes a few seconds to recharge for the next photo when you've taken a photo that demanded full flash energy (a distant subject), and it won't let you switch to viewing photos while that is going on. But the flash is stronger than the ones on my Canon cameras. Overall, the negatives are minor. This is a great camera. You might be able to find it at a reduced price -- the Casio web site no longer lists information on it, which suggests they are phasing it out. | ||
 | Casio Exilim EX-S600 6MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom (Red) | |
| "Very useful camera" | 2007-05-16 |
| I have owned several digital cameras. This Casio EXS600 is my eighth, and it is the most useful one so far. It isn't just that the camera is small, so that I can carry it around all the time. Picture quality is excellent, with sharp images and rich but not unrealistic saturation. The video mode is efficient, producing artifact-free (as far as I can see) videos in relatively little card space (my two Canon cameras yield video of equal quality but use four times as much memory space). The anti-shake feature, while it may not be the best technology (they move the CCD instead of variably bending light in the lens), seems to work. I've gotten hand-held overhead shots in low-light at 1/40 of a second that were quite sharp. There is also an ISO 1600 setting for extreme situations, but results are grainy. Battery life is excellent -- I have taken as many as 150 pictures and several videos in a day and have never seen the indicator fall below 3 bars (out of 3). I like the "past movie" mode, with which you can set it to take videos continuously but keep only the last 8 seconds of activity that occurred before you pressed the button to begin. I know this sounds confusing, but here is an example. I pointed the camara at a rooster and waited for it to crow -- after it did I pressed the movie button to turn the video mode on. When I viewed the video it turned out that I had captured the full crow. This mode is also useful for capturing something that my grandchildren are doing sporadically. There are a few downsides. The cradle is fine for home use but not for travelling. When travelling I use a card reader to feed photos to my laptop and an aftermarket battery charger to charge the battery (Amazon lists many chargers, some that come with spare batteries, for the NP-20 battery). The camera has an instant-on feature that was annoying -- it would turn on in my pocket when the button was pressed lightly accidentally. But it was a menu-selectable item and I turned it off. The flash takes a few seconds to recharge for the next photo when you've taken a photo that demanded full flash energy (a distant subject), and it won't let you switch to viewing photos while that is going on. But the flash is stronger than the ones on my Canon cameras. Overall, the negatives are minor. This is a great camera. You might be able to find it at a reduced price -- the Casio web site no longer lists information on it, which suggests they are phasing it out. | ||
 | Sony HT-DDW670 Home Theater in a Box System | |
| "Great for a small room" | 2006-02-11 |
| I don't have much experience with home theater sound systems. A friend has an expensive one in a large living room, and it makes impressive noises. So when I made the jump to HDTV I decided to upgrade the sound. But the room I use for TV watching is a small bedroom. It didn't make sense to me to spend $500-$600 for sound in this room. This inexpensive Sony (HT-DDW670) unit got good reviews here so I decided to try it. Setting it up was not difficult. It worked the first time I turned it on, and it works very well indeed. As my grandson said when I put on a Harry Potter DVD, "It's awesome, Grandpa." 'Nuff said. | ||
 | Screenblast Movie Studio 3.0 | |
| "Makes me look good!" | 2004-09-14 |
| I bought this software to edit large-format videos that I take with my Minolta Z2 digital camera, which records sound and motion in the Quicktime (*.mov) format. My WinXP Movie Maker can't import that format, and I haven't found a way to make it handle more than 320x240 pixels. I checked other video editing software packages (the ones that allow a free-trial download) and not all of them can import Quicktime files. One more requirement: my Minolta can shoot video at up to 800x600 pixels -- a "knock-your-socks-off" level of resolution. I wanted a video editor that could input and output video files at that level of resolution.
I've found that Screenblast does the best job with the 800x600 format by outputing in MPEG2. MPEG2 is playable in Windows Media Player if it is given the MPEG2 codec (which should have been provided in Windows Service Pack 2 but wasn't). The videos are, if I may immodestly say so, beautiful. They make me look good as a movie maker. I found, to my surprise, that Screenblast is intuitive. You can start using it immediately for simple editing, and teach yourself the fancy tricks as you go along. It is also powerful enough to be fun. For example, you can brighten up a scene that appears dark because it was shot in low light, or correct for a color cast given by tungsten lights. It is sometimes tempting to over-use the wizardry, which can overshadow the video's content. This is not a criticism of the software, only a warning that "...with great power comes great responsibility." | ||
 | Konica Minolta Dimage Z2 4MP Digital Camera with 10x Optical Zoom | |
| "My Z2 seems better than other people's Z2s" | 2004-05-18 |
| I've had my Z2 for about a week and I am very impressed with it. This is my fifth digital still camera (the last was a Sony DSC-S75). Other reviewers have complained of poor image quality and noisy zooming during videos. It almost seems as if they are talking about a different camera. My Z2 has produced very sharp and colorful images (flesh tones are a bit oversaturated even at the "natural" color setting) and the zoom is COMPLETELY silent in the videos I've taken. One reviewer said the videos cannot be edited, but that is not true. The camera comes with Arcsoft software to do some crude editing on the Quicktime (*.mov) files, but it also allows you to save the video in other formats such as MPEG, AVI, and WMV. In those other formats the Windows XP Windows Movie Maker will do additional editing. I recommend you use the AVI version since it seems to introduce the fewest compression artifacts. But you have to download the camera's firmware update (version 1.02, posted 04/23/04) at http://www.minoltausa.com/eprise/main/MinoltaUSA/MUSAContent/CPG/CPGProducts?cname=dig in order to get the sound to transfer along with the video. When you are at the site you have to navigate to the Z2 page and then select "software." Another virtue I've discovered -- the camera is efficient in its use of energy. The deficiencies I've found have to do mainly with downloading images and dealing with them once they are in my computer. The Windows XP download wizard cannot rotate images that were taken in vertical format (as it was able to do with my Sony) unless I first rotate the image in the camera's playback display. Images come in as JPEGS, with perhaps a bit more compression than I would like in the "fine" mode - the file sizes for these 4-megapixel photos are about the same as they were with my 3-megapixel Sony. When I edit an image and then try to save it again as a jpeg, my Ulead PhotoImpact 6.0 software cannot compress the image as much as I may need. And my Printmaster 7.0 cannot see the image, though other JPEGS come in just fine. The workaround that I use is to save the Minolta's image as a Bitmap, close the bitmap file, then reopen it, and then save it as a JPEG at the desired level of compression -- and then Printmaster can see it. Perhaps Minolta has done something with the EXIF data that these software applications cannot deal with. With a camera that generates such widely differing reviews it might be a good idea to buy it where you can return it easily. I got mine at WalMart (Circuit City was out of them) for something like $50 more than the Amazon price, just so I could bring it back quickly. But I'm keeping mine. | ||
 | Cookin' Sounds Kitchen with 15 Accessories | |
 | "You have a right to expect more for [the money]" | 2001-12-24 |
| My grand-daughter has yet to receive this Christmas gift -- this is Christmas Eve and I have just assembled it. She will probably enjoy it -- the stove looks cool when it is lit. But I think a buyer has a right to better quality at this price. Some of the large plastic parts were not correctly cut, making assembly very difficult. You will need much more than a screwdriver to put it together. Not enough thought has gone into the engineering. For example, if the toy phone had been located 1/4 inch lower, it would have been possible for a small child to take it out and put it back, without interfering with anything else. The kitchen is disappointing in view of the quality I found on other Little Tykes products I purchased in the past. | ||
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