The right way to do photography in the 21st century is DIDO: digital in, digital out. But the same schizos who designed the Apple PowerBook 540c (Wired 2.10, page 134) must've come up with the QuickTake100 camera, because its features alternate between slick and sick.
Slick are the 640-by-480 24-bit color images. This is more resolution than anything even close to it in price. In this regard it's an industry leader. It can tuck eight high-res images into its solid state memory (lots of memory: nearly a megabyte per big pic). And it won't forget them for a year, even if you take the batteries out. At half that resolution it can take 32 pictures, and you can mix resolutions on the fly. (640-by-480 from any digital camera, by the way, is not close to photographic resolution, and images are soft.)
Sick is that most people open the camera by putting their thumbs in what seems to be a finger grip and sliding the front cover: the "finger grip" is actually the lens opening, so this maneuver usually results in a perfectly smeared fingerprint on the lens. Also, if the camera's gone to sleep (which it does after five minutes or some other user-chosen interval), pressing the shutter button wakes it up. Of course, if it's not asleep it takes a picture. And you can't erase just one picture; it's either all or none.
Slick is the ease of installing the program and using it with your computer. It doesn't even care which serial port (on a Mac) you plug it into; it finds the right one for itself. And kudos to the designer of the clever cover over the serial port that slides out of the way; it's easy to use, unmistakable, and unbreakable.
Sick is the lack of threads for attaching close-up lenses, filters, or other accessories, not to mention the long horizontal distance (2 inches) between viewfinder and camera lens; it puts close things off-center.
Slick is the software. Using it is a no-brainer. And versions of this product are available for Mac or for Windows. (Apple is waking up!)
Sick is that the provided nicads are not recharged when you have the camera plugged into the wall; you have to use a separate charger. The spirit is willing but the flash is weak: its range is all of 9 feet.
Unless you like really expensive digital point-and-shoots or need quick images without being too fussy about image quality, I'd wait for Apple's second try. By the way, the pictures in Apple's ads for the camera were not taken with one.
Apple QuickTake 100: US$749, connection kit: $99. Apple: (800) 538 9696, +1 (408) 996 1010.
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