Reviews
Epson
PhotoPC L-410
Your basic point & shooter
Epson
makes some of the very best printers and scanners in the world,
but they are not exactly known as a digital camera company. In
fact, if you go to the Epson website you find exactly one digital
camera listed there. This one. It is made in China, so the highly
regarded Seiko Epson Corporation probably didn't mean for it to
be a showcase of their often stunning technology. And it isn't.
In fact, the Epson PhotoPC L-410 digital camera is about as basic
and straightforward a point & shooter as you can get.
So what made
them offer the L-410 and why would you want to consider it? Because
Epson does know a great deal about imaging. Their highly regarded
PRINT Image Matching (P.I.M) technology is used by many other
makers of digital cameras including most of the big names in digital
imaging. P.I.M. guarantees that you get the best possible color
print from your digital pictures. To learn more about it and see
how it works, check www.printimagematching.com. In short, PRINT
tags pictures with all the important information a printer needs
to know to create the best picture.
What
this means is that some people who already have Epson printers
and scanners would probably be interested in an Epson digital
camera as well. After all, components from the same manufacturer
always work well together and you're not likely to encounter incompatible
standards as you do when you mix and match. In addition, if Epson
invented the PRINT standard, chances are they did a very good
job in using it in their own products. So the rationale for buying
an Epson camera is definitely there.
Why Epson
chose to limit itself to just one model is less obvious. The L-410
is a nice little ultra-compact with a smooth iridescent mother-of-pearl
type of finish and couldn't be easier to use. The whole idea here
is that of a simple and fun camera that still has enough megapixel
and good enough optics to take good quality pictures. You can
also do other fun, consumer-oriented things with it, like taking
full VGA (640 x 480 pixel) movies with sounds that can be as long
as you have space on the internal 16MB of memory or a Secure Digital
card. You can also record up to 30 seconds of commentary with
each picture. Or you can shoot continuously at about three pictures
a second until the card is memory is full. Kids and others young
at heart will love the PRINT Image Framer that allows you to overlay
funny frames over pictures and then output them directly to an
Epson PictureMate or Stylus printer.
In
automatic mode you don't have to do anything but point & shoot,
nor can you change anything. In manual mode you gain control over
a few settings, like picture resolution, exposure compensation,
scene modes, white balance and such. And you have access to various
flash modes and a macro mode.
In playback
mode you can deeply zoom into a picture in 18 steps, pan around,
do slide shows, tag images for print either individually or in
albums, annotate a voice memo or copy pictures from memory to
a card.
As far as
power goes, the L-410 uses a single Lithium CR-3V cell, or you
can use two AAs of any kind. Unfortunately, there isn't a retainer,
so when you open the battery compartment to, say, take out the
SD Card, the battery can fall out and wipe out your date settings.
There really
isn't all that much else to say about the L-410. You either like
this extreme point & shoot simplicity or you don't. One thing
we did not like is the tiny 1.5-inch display that washes out almost
completely in sunlight. Another thing that may be a deal breaker
is the price. For $399 you generally get a lot more and Epson
should know that. ÷Kirk Linsky
ö Kirk Linsky
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