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Acer Digital Camera CS-553
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The camera is 9x5x2cm and weights around 180grams. It has a huge 5x4cm TFT screen that dominates the rear of the camera, to the right of the screen is the near mandatory five position wheel, three further buttons and the rocker for wide angle/ telephoto. The top has on/off shutter and three position slider still/movie/replay.
The base has screw for tripod, the left side has a proprietary AV out that also charges the lithium battery. The right side has wrist strap anchor point and door that hides the battery and SD card. Finally the front has the f5.4-16.2mm 3x optical zoom lens and the flash mounted above and slightly to the side.
When not in use the lens is covered and for additional protection especially for the TFT screen a simple fabric case with Velcro fastening is supplied. I often moan about people supplying 16MB cards saying why not at least 32MB here Acer go one better and give a 64MB SD card, well done.
This unit can take images in four resolutions, 5MP, 3MP, 1.2MP and VGA. The exact sizes are 2560x1920, 2048x1536, 1280x960 and 640x480. Each image can be saved in one of three compression sizes, fine, standard and economy, so twelve different ways of filling the 64MB SD card anywhere between 27 and 775 images.
While on figures this unit as with most digital cameras can take short movie sequences, 320x240 is common but this one can also take movies at 640x480, there are two compression modes meaning the 64MB card can hold between 82 and 320 seconds of video.
I easily managed to print images at A4 and in fact managed to print a portion of some images at the same size, 5MP should produce a reasonable image on an A3 printer but I do not have one of those. In fact 3MP produced perfectly respectable results at A4.
I found that images taken using flash appeared to be over exposed when viewed on the TFT display, however, when printed or shown on a PC they were fine.
Acer provide a printed user guide thats refreshing and 74 pages are in English. If you are more than a novice user it will tell you how to adjust a number of items to give a virtual manual mode. It would have been nice to have an extra setting of the slider so that those settings could be available for the occasions they are required. By default digital zoom is shown after the optical zoom but this option can be removed in the menu. It is also possible to record voice memos of up to 30 seconds again delve into the easy to navigate menus. Finally it has the ability to capture images using macro mode as close as 6cm.
The likely price of the CS-5530 is £199.
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