Decent compact with good zoom range

This is not meant as a review, more like quick impressions since no one has reviewed this camera before on DPR.

I bought this model a few days ago, as a gift to my mother-in-law who has lost an old digicam. I had time to fiddle a bit with it and get a good idea on how it operates and such.

The camera (black model) is a small, attractive camera. It's like an Iphone4 in size, but maybe twice as thick at about the same weight (around 150g). It's definitely a shirt or pants pocket camera. The best camera is the one you carry with you, right? I don't think I have particularly big hands, but I initially thought the camera is slightly awkward to operate because it is so small. You adapt and learn to hold it with the tip of your fingers, but I think I'd personally prefer if it were a bit larger.

It must be said that it's almost all plastic contruction so it doesn't have that premium feel. The battery/SD card card feels flimsy too. It's not a gadget you should be too rough with.

The camera features a 2/3 sensor, rather standard for a compact camera, and boasts 20MP. From my experience with high-end smartphones, I don't think the IQ is really any better. The specs state it can go up to ISO3200, but the camera's comfort zone is lower than that, maybe ISO1600 in good light, below ISO800 in bad light if you don't want overly noisy, smudgy photos. Be prepared to shoot with the flash a lot indoors (and don't zoom in too much). I believe the whole reason for even getting this camera is for the zoom range rather than IQ, if you already own a smartphone, that is.

Considering the zoom range (12X), I was pleasantly surprised the lens doesn't really extend all that much when turned on, maybe 4cm at most? It's discrete. The range of the zoom is very useful, from a wide 25mm (in 35mm terms) all the way to 300mm in telephoto. I thought you could zoom in and out fairly quickly too. You can go even further than 300mm with the digital zoom, but I didn't even bother to check it out, I turned that feature off based on my experience from other cameras with digital zooms and how it destroys picture quality. Apparently, the lens is equipped with some sort of optical stabilisation and based on photos I took, including some at 300mm at 1/15s, none are blurry. So it definitely works.

The lens small size does come at a cost: it's relatively slow, from f3.5 at the wide end to f7 at the telephoto end. Considering the inboard flash is only effective at short distances, I would only zoom a lot with this camera in broad daylight unless you want those noisy, smudgy photos I talked about.

As expected, the camera comes with standard landscape and macro modes. The latter allows you to shoot only a few centimeters from your subject, but the lens must be zoomed out. But mostly, the whole camera operation is one big AUTO mode. I think it works well enough and the target demographics will be pleased. AF is adequately fast with some basic face recognition and subject tracking. Just don't expect it to keep up with your running (grand) kids. I appreciated that the camera tends to stay within its comfort zone.

The only thing that bothered me was the limited flash options, there's no red-eye option and you do get a lot of flash photos with red eyes and there's no way, as far as I could tell, to correct those when reviewing the photos in-camera. It's something you must do in your computer or smartphone, and as it just happens, this camera as basic WI-FI functions to transfer your photos to other devices.

Small cameras come with small batteries. It's no different here. It's not the type of camera you shoot all day with, unless you have spare batteries with you. It comes with it's own charger that you plug in onto a wall socket. Charging was about 2-3 hours. The camera itself has HDMI and AV outs.