User Experience: Concord 5340z

I previously owned the Concord EyeQ 4363Z, and when the newer 5.1MP camera was available for $99.00 after a mail-in rebate, I decided it was time for an upgrade. I sold the 4.1MP 4363Z, and bought the 5340z at TigerDirect. What a mistake!

Still Photography
The 5.1MP photos that this camera takes are extremely noisy. I cannot emphasise this enough. Very very noisy. It makes the resolution of the camera pointless, when the 5.1M dots in the image are all close to the right color, but none of them are actually at the right one. You can take a picture of a clear blue sky, and looking at the image at full resolution, you will see pixels that range in color from red to blue.

Time from power up to the camera being ready to take photos is about 5 seconds (approx), which is quite a bit more that what one would expect. The time between photos is about 5 seconds, and is pretty irritating, when you have your composition framed, press the shutter button, and the camera just sits there giving you a blank stare in the face. Many photo ops missed this way, and I am just talking about general around-the-house family type stuff.

The White balance on the camera is also pretty pathetic. Almost all photos I take will this need to be modified in Picasa to change the white balance, and correct the fill light.

This camera is supposed to have an autofocus, but from my experience, it seems more like a random focus camera. About 30% of the photos are not focused right. There might be some user error contributing to this, but the user's world doesnt quite work in the slow motion that would tolerate the slow autofocus and the very long lag time between photos that this camera needs.

Movie mode
The specs on the website at TigerDirect claim that this camera can do 640x480 mpeg4 video, but I am not so sure of that. Either the camera is expanding a 320x240 image, or the mpeg4 encoding software is really lousy, so as to not overwhelm the image processing chip on this camera that all movies with this camera are extremey quantized. The movie consists of a set of about 10x10 pixel blocks that seem to move around in some pseudo co-ordinated mode, and if you were at the original occasion that was filmed (or digitized) you might recognize what was going on. Ofcourse, you need to be taking the movies in plenty of light to see anything usefull.

Conclusion
The camera looks like a great value in terms of its specs, but I would think the $99.00 for the camera are better spent on a 3MP or 4MP camera from Canon or Kodak or such. Even the 4.1MP 4353z from Concord itself performs better than this one in real world usage. I will upload photos to illustrate the problems with this camera when I get a chance...