Impress PC Watch report from the Computex Taipei 2000 exhibition, where low cost, OEM, CMOS and multimedia (MP3) digital cameras are seen by local manufacturers as the only way to break into the low end digital camera market.

Here's my rough translation of the Impress PC Watch report:

Little unknown OEM manufacturer TOPTRONIC showed their Skina brand digital cameras which featured a 1/4" CCD producing VGA resolution (640 x 480) and 30fps CIF (352 x 288) video clips. The PDV-300 has 2MB of built-in memory and accepts SmartMedia but does not have an LCD and is priced at just 75 US dollars, the PDV-301 the size of a business card again features 2MB of built-in memory but does not accept any other form of storage, expected price around 70 US dollars.

The rather funky looking S-Cam F2 (who thinks up these names?) from Minton Optic Industry features a 350,000 pixel CMOS sensor which is interpolated to generate an XGA (1024 x 768) image, again built-in 2MB of storage, no additional storage can be added. The "F2" can also take 40 second video clips at 20fps @ 160 x 120. Expected retail price 65 US Dollars.

TNC Industrial showed their TinyCam DV300U, again featuring a 300,000 pixel CMOS sensor producing 640 x 480 stored onto the built-in 2MB of flash ram, again no additional storage can be added.

Pretec showed off their DC-520 (yikes, haven't they heard that Kodak have a very similar sounding model... slightly different league though) another CMOS driven digicam with just 2MB of storage, VGA (640 x 480) resolution and USB communications. Price? Expected to be 129 US Dollars.

Pretec also showed an interesting camera of the new breed of multimedia digital cameras, their DC-530 features a CMOS sensor (just 640 x 480) AND MP3 playback. Interestingly this little digicam features CompactFlash storage Type II which would make it a better choice for those more interested in listening to music (you can get a lot of music on a MicroDrive).

Pretec also had a prototype of a higher-end digicam in the DC-2000 with a 2.3 megapixel sensor (1792 x 1200), 2.3x optical zoom and and a 1.8" LCD display.

The only other news of interest to digital photography enthusiasts was a new dye-sub photo printer from Akica (yep another name you'll not have heard of before.. Don't worry we'll probably see it with a known brand name on it when it hits our shores), the EZFoto has a CF Slot which means you can just plug your CF card directly in the side and print immediately, expected price is around 400 US Dollars.