Samsung Digimax 880K

really good starter camera, however there are cheaper and better on the market for what you get. Make sure you get a good repair plan with your camera for up to 3 years!

I bought this digital camera as a Jenoptic JD12 - same camera but only £119. It has 800k pixels which gives you plenty of spare to produce more that adequate pictures for websites at 320x240. It works best in good light where the pictures are acceptably sharp. You can make up for the lack of zoom by cropping down to this size.

It will take good pictures in good fluorescent lighting but gets very fuzzy in low light. The built-in flash works well but has a limited range (1-1.5m).

The TWAIN software is easy to use but limited. You cannot chose to download individual pictures - only the whole lot. There is alternative software available - JDVIEW - from www.hlembke.de which is much more flexible.

Considering the alternatives - a very limited camera at £50 or £200 for something with a few more features this must be excellent value for updating websites or e-mailing snaps. (The high definition pictures from quality cameras have much to big a file size for these uses)

It will probably be worthless in a couple of years as cameras get better and cheaper - but so will many more expensive devices!

Buy now, enjoy - but expect a box Brownie rather than a Leica.

OK, so it's a budget camera. Does that mean I have to be nice? The Samsung Digimax feels tacky, light and plasticky, like a kiddie's toy camera. NOT what I would fancy forking out £150 for. The lens is focus-free (they couldn't afford a TTL autofocus system at this price) and gives consistently fuzzy, badly out of focus results. I can honestly say that the lens is focus-free. Never once did it come close to focussing while I used it.

The controls are fiddly, as there is only an LCD on top of the camera. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be an issue (as on 35mm cameras, for example) but in the Digimax's case, the implementation is so lame it bears mentioning. When changing quality (presumably from 'bad' to 'worse') there is a pause, prompting you, at first, to think that nothing has registered, so of course you try again, only to find that it has just processed your initial request, and now gets tied up for another four or five seconds while it tries to sort your new command. Is this what they did with all those unwanted Sinclair ZX81 processors?

Budget means cheap. Under no circumstances buy this camera, as I can find nothing about it that would make me recommend it. Pay the extra and get a Kodak DC215 or a Fuji MX1200.