Toshiba PDR-M21

Opinion: I purchased the Toshiba PDR-M21 after receiving a "gift" card due to the Toshiba Floppy disk settlement. The camera has two short comings in my opinion: The lack of a zoom lens, and a habbit of turning itself on if you even slightly bump the on/off dial which is located on the topside of the camera on the rightside. The dial is large enough that you have to make a concerted effort NOT to bump it when storing the camera. The saving grace is that the Toshiba will turn itself off after a time the user specifies (1 minute is the factory default) if you do accidently bump it.

The camera therefore is basically a 2 megapixel point and shoot. The photographs it produces though are really quite good for a 2MegPix camera, and I've been quite happy with the ones taken from the camera. The colors are very good with no noticable color shifts, and I was quite amazed at the good fleshtones achieved with or without the built in flash.

I purchased a 128Meg Smartmedia card for it, and am able to take over 110 photos on the highest resolution setting.

Battery life appears to be average. I'm on the second set of batteries now, after shooting about 70 photos on a recent hunting trip.

Opinion: It´s a very good camera, for its price, I´m feel happy and the pictures are excellent.

Opinion: This is my second toshiba camera (first was a pdr m4), and I am overall pleased with it.

It's a nice looking toshiba camera that I chose because of it's price ($150 or less on ebay), and it's ability to use AA batteries. Expecting the image quality to be better than the older generation toshiba cameras, I thought this would be an excellent camera.

But it's image quality dissapointed me. When taking full resolution photos (1600x1200), it has issues with contrast. When zooming in closely to differences between light and dark colors, you will see a line of speckles or dots between the colors. Being able to take pictures in TIFF format doesn't improve it, either. This is easily fixed by various filters in photo editing programs, but I expected it to have better image quality than my old pdr m4. It doesn't have the contrast problem with 800x600 photos.

Another thing I didn't like about it was it's windows drivers. Unlike the pdr-m4, which after the driver installation, I could just plug in the camera and copy pictures from it like a removable drive, the m21 is more nit-picky. It requires you to use a twain application from inside a photo editing program, the same way you would with a scanner. In addition to that, you have to click an icon to remove the camera from windows before you can unplug the camera or turn it off, or windows (win2k in my case) throws a fit. While the extra 30 seconds it takes to do that isn't much, it just irritates me because the older m4 did this process much smoother.

Other small problems are - makes weird noises when turned on, too easily turned on by accident, no lens cover, and the batteries and smartmedia are in the same opening.

But despite all of it's problems, it's the best camera I could find for $150 :) I don't regret this purchase at all.