Ricoh RDC-5300

The latest in the Ricoh digital camera range is the RDC-5300. It's capable of a resolution of up to 1792x1200 pixels, allowing 8x10in prints, and comes with a 3x zoom lens, equivalent to a 38-114mm lens on a 35mm film camera. As well as the optical lens, you can use the viewfinder or the 1.8in LCD screen to frame your shots. However, if you use the viewfinder, the camera's design means that the zoom lens control buttons are hard to operate.

The internal 8Mb of memory will store nine shots at the highest resolution and on the best-quality settings. Extra memory can be added via a SmartMedia card.

Picture quality is generally good, although the colours are a little dull. There was some pixellation on the shots, but details were picked up well. There are plenty of image adjustment settings to improve your shots, including exposure, white balance and focus adjustments.

The bundled CD contains an image manipulation package, ArcSoft Camera Suite, CameraUtility for downloading shots, and TWAIN and USB drivers. The printed manual, however, gave no clue as to how to use any of these.

We worked out that you can connect the camera to the PC only through the USB port if you use the ArcSoft Camera Suite. ArcSoft has one utility to download the pictures and another to manipulate and save images. Having these two applications slows down the transfer process considerably as you swap from one utility to the other. Although the serial connection was slower for download, it was ultimately faster than using USB because you could use the TWAIN drivers to download and save images to a single application like Paint Shop Pro.

Contact Jonson's Photopia 01782 753322

Minimum requirements: Windows 98/95/NT 4.0, 32Mb RAM, 6Mb hard disk space, CD-ROM drive.

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