Kyocera Finecam S5R

Opinion: In fairness, mine seems to be defective. I'm posting because I noticed that there seems to be a flood of these on the market at very low prices lately, and I fear that Kyocera or some middle man has dumped a bunch of bad ones. It exhibits horrible horizontal bands across the image. It's like every tenth or twelfth row of pixels is dark brown.

Otherwise, the camera seems to be sturdy, and its controls react fairly quickly to input. It starts up quickly, and this was one reason I bought it. I was also impressed by the reviews stressing its lack of shutter lag. That's been a little disappointing. I also own a Sony DSC-V1, which seems every bit as fast in shooting, and which Sears is selling at killer prices all around the country right now. The V1 starts up slower, but fires as quickly, and lot more accurately. The S5R fires quickly when the focus is confirmed, but even then, it's out of focus much of the time (despite the supposed focus confirmation). The V1 on the other hand, focus quickly, shoots quickly, and is almost always dead-on accurate.

The pop-up flash is an annoying design feature. It's right where lots of people want to put a finger. But,the Sony has the same flaw. If you hold the camera correctly,with the left hand cradling it from the bottom, it's not an issue.
Another real annoyance is the limited manual control. There are only two user-selectable f-stops in the manual mode. On the Sony, I get everything from 2.8 to 8 in third-stop increments.

Opinion: Paid $199 at Fry's on sale (Normal $299)

It is FAST! Pictures could be a little sharper on distant subjects, but $199 for a FAST 5mp is great. There is NO SHUTTER LAG!!! Very small!

Opinion: Two fatal flaws that make a great camera almost unuseable.

There is something deperately wrong with the focus system. I've been usung the camera now for about two years and I still cannot understand why so many photos are completely out of focus.

Battery consumption and/or battery type means always running out of power, especially when cold. Skiing photos? Forget it!

Very disappointed and buying a replacement now.

Opinion: Had a sony 5mp that I really, really liked. But my brother's rca digital broke
while he was visiting from California so I gave it to him. Not seeing many
reviews and even fewer pictures from this camera, I bought it primarily for the
speed. I am getting tired of lag time. So when I received the camera, had my
buddy drop a piece of paper and I tried to catch it whenever he would drop it.
Success! (His camera did it too- it was a D70). I took some tourist shots last
week at the WWII memorial and took a lot of pics to get a feel for what it can
do.
http://pbase.com/steffanovich
I found out my version of software was 1.04 and could not find the new
firmware until I read Kim's review here.
I intend to do a reshoot of the pics I did in version 1.07 and see what the
difference may be.
I'm glad I gave my brother the Sony.

Opinion: For me "The moment is the picture" - a lot of camera manufactures ignores that fact and makes a lot of fancy cameras with prime linses, high resolution, but with the motive gone before the camera decides to shoot. In sports action, that exact moment, and the ability to shoot continously for more than just a few seconds, were my prime reason to buy a digital camera. Started off with the Minolta A2, but in spite of all the spectacular reviews of that camera, it went back to the store after 3 days. Autofocus was awfully slow, manually slow required two full turnovers on the focus ring, the burst foto series (7 fps at only VGA resolution, took several minutes to find into the menus). So the moment would be gone in 90% of the time. This specific slow behaviour seems to be the problem with most digital cameras. The only ones actually lives up to the promise of an "instant" camera for an unlimited number of shots, seems to be either Nikon D70 (3fps practically unlimited, and no shutter lag at all!) or the Kyocera RTUNE series of cameras. After having my hands on the A2, which is roughly the same size as D70, I've found those SLR or SLR-like cameras to be too large to handle in everyday situations. So Kyocera was the only choise left in the market for fast and pocket size cameras - and the S5R fullfills the promise of instant digital fotos. Also takes quite good, sharp photos. I'm impressed with the amount of light the optic is capable of handling. In standard settings, it performs much better than one would expect of a compact camera with such a relatively small CCD-chip (1/1.8") compared to D70 or a normal analog camera. Battery life seems adequate in spite of most reviews. With 200 - 250 pictures on a 512 MB card, and the camera capable of taking roughly 200, that should be enough for a days footage (even though some series easily takes 20 or more pictures). If I skip previewing the fotos, I should imagine that I could fill the card in just one battery (never uses the TFT for framing though). Optical viewfinder is the most acurate I've found in any digital camera. (surpasses all Olympus and Canon I've encountered - which only shows a fraction of the actual picture taken). Also very easy to use. All buttons that you need in the action is present, so its fast to use as well.

Opinion: I gave it to my wife for Christmas as a substitute for her film compact. After more than three months with the cam we are really dissapointed. Half of the pics turned out being out of focus, the other half shows a heavy red eye problem we never had with the film compact. A construction problem is the settings wheel in the back which is very easily turned by accident. I really can´t recommend the cam. My wife went back using her old Canon fim point &shoot.

Opinion: Simple camera which makes excelent pictures. You can zoom during macro - rare, it extends macro from 12cm to 4cm. Very fast picture review in a few steps 2, 4, 8 - effective for sharpness control.
It's our family pocket camera, I have Sony F828 for more serious playing.

Opinion: This small 'gadget' is a very serious player. I was told that the S5R was extremely fast and full of features, so that was my basic drive to buy it. After a week i still feel surprised by this camera, and good for me, in a very positive way. My father also bought a 5M pix cam, but for only 100 Euro less. He never heard of shooting 3 pix a second until the card is full, 640x480 with 30 fps, and lots more options that are standard on mine. Keep this S5R in mind when considering a small good looking camera with some very serious and good working features. Apologise for my English, but i hope you all get the picture!
<<PS. make sure you buy a large fastspeed 10MB/s sd card, not the standard sd card>>

Opinion: I have been shooting since I was 12 (I'm 50). I've used many cameras. Yashica (first was a Electro 35 Gold). Canon. Nikon. Olympus. Contax. And for the 14 years, a Leica rangefinder. I wanted to go 'digital' but I wanted a camera that would be as light and quick as the Leica. And with a decent optics. While some digital cameras are certainly up to the task, their bulk and energy requirements were far from my desires. So in the meantime, I got a digital film scanner and continued shooting on 35mm. The Contax TVS digital came out and while I was intrigued by the potential of the optics I was totally unimpressed with the infuriating 'shutter lag'. Plus parallax issues abounded. Then this the S5R came out. Wow! This camera is lightning fast. Powers up instantly. Shoots high resolution equally as fast. Shot after shot. It's small, but it's remarkably heavy and well-built. So camera shake is minimal. Best of all, on checking images vs the viewfinder, the parallax (on wide shots at least) is negligible-a very very good thing. The images load down to pc in a jiffy. It takes the SD memory cards (I carry 256 MB units which hold about 100 Fine images). And the optics, are excellent. (I figured the Kyocera people had to have learned one or two things from their association with Zeiss.) In short, Kyocera nailed it. P.S. I use an external 4.6 amp-hour battery with an adapter plug for extended use. Keeps things down a lot.