As I discussed in a review of another small digital camera, I wanted
something to replace my cell phone camera, something small enough to
fit in a pocket and inexpensive enough that if I lost or damaged it I
wouldn't be as upset as I would if I damaged my $800 Nikon. The
first camera I acquired was one from some Chinese outfit called
"DigiGR8". It worked if there was a lot of light (like at
high-noon outdoors) but with less light its photo quality rapidly
degraded. While that made it adequate for some of my uses, it
didn't work for all. Based on my experiences with the DigiGR8, I
decided that I'd need a flash to do any indoor shooting. Since
that camera also connected to the PC successfully only once in about a
10 attempts, I decided to get one that used some kind of removable
medium (SD/MMC, CompactFlash, etc.) so I could just drop that into a
card reader and not have to use the buggy USB interface. This led
me to the "Generic SQ908 MEGA-cam" at Geeks.com. Some web searches tell me this camera is made by "SQ Tech Co., Ltd." out of China.
 Front of the Camera
This 3.0 megapixel camera offers 16MB of internal memory (7-156 images
depending on quality settings and compression), a 0.9 inch LCD display,
USB 1.1 connectivity, removable rechargeable battery, an SD/MMC card
slot, a carrying case, wrist strap, driver CD, and USB cable.
The camera's packaging is extremely bare-bones. It's a generic
white box with lots of rubber-stamped information on the outside.
 Camera Box Inside is a small metal box with the camera in a vacuum-formed plastic
tray that is very form-fitting.  Inside the Box  Carrying Pouch - Pretty Low Tech
Physically, the camera is ideal for the use I have set it to.
It's a mere 2.31" x 3.62" x 0.87" and 100g in weight. That makes
it smaller than a pack of cigarettes (I think, I don't smoke them so
I'm not positive). The weight is comparable (in my hands) to
about a stack of 6 CDs out of their jewel cases (and according to some
quick research, a CD weighs approximately 15g, so 6 of them at 90g is
pretty close to the camera's reported 100g weight). The exterior
case is mostly plastic with (I believe) some metal. Its size is
comfortable and the low weight makes it easy to hold for extended
periods. The shutter release control is sufficiently large (about
the width of a dime). The power button, on the rear of the unit,
is separated from the rest. It also serves as one of the two menu
controls. The "SET" button is another menu control and also can
be used to turn the flash on or off. The two arrow buttons in the
middle simplify navigation through the pictures during playback.
The "play/camera" button allows viewing of the stored images and
switching back to camera mode.
 Shutter Button  Camera Back
There are two ports on the outside of the camera. One is the USB
1.1 port that can both charge the camera and allow it to interface with
a PC (but drivers must be installed for the interface to work).
The other port is a 5V DC charge port, which can be used to charge the
camera with an optional (not included) AC adapter.
 USB and Power Port
The SD card slot is on the bottom of the camera. Inserting an SD
card is relatively easy. You simply press it into the slot until
it clicks into place. It will remain firmly locked into place
until you remove it. Removing the SD card is a little
trickier. You have to push it in with a finger/thumbnail until it
clicks again, then release it so that it "pops up" out of the
slot. Then you can grasp and remove it. It isn't
unnecessarily difficult to do, but it does require a little more
pressure than you might expect it to. I tried the camera with
both a 128MB and 256MB SD card (the only sizes I personally own or have
access to) and it seems to like them both fine.
 Inserting an SD Card  SD Card Inserted
The LCD display on the back of the camera is 0.9" diagonally.
This makes it about two-thirds the height and three-fourths the width
of a typical U.S. postage stamp. (It's a little deceptive in the
images of the camera because there is a huge black matte around the
outside of the LCD. The LCD itself takes up only a portion of
that black area on the back of the camera.) The screen is
backlit, making it easier to see indoors. However, it's images
are somewhat grainy and you can't tell for sure whether a picture
you've just taken is going to be clearly focused or slightly out of
focus in it. It's far from useless, though. If the flash
washes out a picture, you will be able to tell that instantly, and if
the image is very poorly focused, that will be obvious, too. A
larger and clearer LCD would have been nice, but I don't expect much
for a $49.99 camera.
The documentation says that the first few times the camera is used, it
should be charged for about 12 hours. That makes sense to me,
seeing as the battery's charge was somewhat out of the box.
Still, I was able to shoot a number of indoor test shots before
plugging it in to charge for the night.
The camera's menu system is almost entirely icon-driven. That is,
aside from the number of shots remaining in the camera's internal
memory or memory card, the "USB" label on the connectivity option, and
the "SQ" or "HQ" on the shot quality selection, there isn't any text in
the interface. Fortunately, the icons are reasonably well chosen
and documenteddecently in the manual, so it is pretty easy to
familiarize yourself with the camera's (limited) options. The one
option that I've had some trouble with is the "HQ/SQ" setting.
This appears to reset itself to "SQ" on occasion after the camera is
powered off. It doesn't happen all the time, so I'm wondering if
I'm doing something accidentally to cause it, but I don't think so.
 Close-Up of Display
The camera's menus allow you to choose the image resolution, from
640x480 (VGA) to 2048x1536 (QXGA) or 2304x1728 interpolated. You
can also set "standard quality" or "high quality", which affects image
size and compression ratio. You can switch to USB mode (where the
camera acts as a USB removable drive to Windows once drivers have been
loaded). You can switch to AVI mode, where the camera records 12
frames per second VGA (640x480) video or 20 frames per second QVGA
(320x240) video.
My experiences with the "DigiGR8" camera taught me that some of these
cheap Chinese cameras have lousy and unreliable USB interfaces.
That's the case with this camera also. I've found that the
interface works (more often than not) if I first reboot the PC, power
on the camera, navigate its menus to "USB mode", then connect the USB
cable. Even then, more times than not I'll get an error from
Windows XP indicating that the device couldn't be recognized or that it
has a "problem" connecting. With perseverence you can eventually
get the camera to come up as a removable disk in Windows
Explorer. From there it's a simple matter to copy the photos from
the camera to your computer. If you don't have that kind of
patience or time, I recommend investing a few more bucks in an SD
memory card and using that instead of the camera's meager internal
memory. You can pop out the SD card and read it in an external
card reader a lot easier than you can get the camera to connect to a PC.
Indoors, in medium-to-low light, with the flash off, the camera's
images are not very good. Indoors in bright light with a very
steady pair of hands you'll get "tolerable" quality shots (the camera's
need to open its shutter wide for low light means that even the tiniest
movement of your hands will blur the image). Indoors with the
flash the images will vary from decent quality to even good
quality. Photographing anything closer than about 2 feet with the
flash on will most likely completely wash out the image.
The movie mode isn't very useful indoors unless you have a lot of
bright light. Outdoors it works OK. At 12fps in VGA mode,
the video will look somewhat jerky and slow. At 20fps in QVGA
it's better. With no audio capture, this camera isn't going to
replace your camcorder anytime soon. In a pinch, though, it would
let you catch a quick movie to illustrate something that a still image
couldn't.
The camera uses a battery which is labeled as 3.7v and 500mAh. Its
label says only "CD310C3G" and "Rechargeable Li-ion battery for #90379
digital camera. I couldn't find any batteries online that listed
either of those numbers. It looks similar to the NP-60 but it looks to
me like that battery is thicker than this one.  Battery  Battery Label
This is not a camera you'd want to use for rapid-fire action
shots. In medium or low light situations, the time between
pressing the shutter button and the picture being taken is 1-2
seconds. The camera takes another 2-3 seconds to store the
image before it's ready to shoot again. The flash recharges
quickly, however, and is ready pretty much as quickly as the camera
is.
Due to this being an entry-level camera with few bells and whistles,
image quality is highly variable depending on several factors,
including the level of ambient lighting, the steadiness of the
operator's hands, the distance from the subject, and the camera's
"fixed focus" nature. Generally speaking, the brighter the
ambient light in the environment, the better the photo will turn
out. The steadier the operator's hands, the better the photo will
turn out. If the subject is relatively close (less than 3 feet
away) and the flash is used, the subject will often be washed
out. Below is a link to a Flickr.com album containing some sample images I've taken with the camera.
Within my range of criteria (pocket size, low price, flash, SD slot),
this is a pretty good little camera. As you can see above, its
image quality is decent, its menus reasonably easy to work with, its
size and weight very comfortable, and its controls easy to work
with. It's not ideal, though. The "smaller than a postage
stamp" LCD makes it easy to frame a shot but hard to tell if the
finished shot is any good, its performance in lower light levels is
poor without the flash, and the flash overpowers the camera in
close-range shots. Update: 02/09/2006: I've had the opportunity to shoot a couple of short videos with the camera. Generally speaking, they come out reasonably well though they will look extremely shaky compared to what you see done with the typical home video camera. They'll also be a bit blurrier. They have no audio either. Still, if you're trying to capture something that involves motion, it's not altogether bad at doing that. There seems to be approximately a 1 minute, 8 second limit to the amount of video you can shoot before it automatically stops. That limits usefulness somewhat, naturally. Although the manufacturer claims that it can focus down to a pretty short distance, the reality is that if you get much closer than about 3 feet the image is going to be blurry. Beyond that distance, details will generally be as sharp and clear as the available light will allow (less light and no flash = blurry images, more light and flash = less blurry and more sharp).
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