Setup
To test this camera, I used my USB enabled Sony VAIO 600 MHz Pentium III laptop.
After taking the camera out of the box, I first installed all the included software. The D-Link DSC-350 comes with a drivers disk and two image editing programs: MGI PhotoSuite IIISE and VideoWave IIISE. The drivers disk installed TWAIN support to my laptop, while the other two programs installed image and video editing software. Installation for all three of these applications was flawless; the total time for installation was less than five minutes.
The camera itself came ready to shoot with a set of two AAA batteries, a USB cable, and a small, well-built tripod.
Appearance
The camera is pretty small. It's about four inches across, 2 inches high, and an inch deep. The camera is made out of plastic, making it feel lightweight but cheap. Unlike other digital cameras, there is no LCD screen built into the back of the camera, which forced me to use the more traditional viewfinder in the upper left corner. The camera only has three buttons, Mode/Power, Delete/Remain, and the shutter button. The USB port is built into the side of the camera. The top of the camera has a digital readout, which tells you how many photos you've taken, what mode you're in, and in what resolution you're taking pictures.
Performance
The camera claims to be a high performance digital still camera, digital video camera, and web cam. Unfortunately, the camera was unable to live up to being a digital camera or video camera, although its web-cam performance was quite good.
Setting the DSC-350 up to be a digital camera was easy. To power on the camera, I had to press the power button down and hold for three seconds. While this worked most of the time, sometimes the camera wouldn't turn on, and I would have to try again. Also, the camera has a power-off mode, which will turn the camera off after one minute if it hasn't been used in that time. This became somewhat of an annoyance as I tried to take pictures, since the camera would turn off right when I was about to push the shutter button.
The camera can be used in three resolutions, 1024x768, 640x480, and 320x240, and the included 8 MB Flash card can store up to 500 pictures when the camera is in 320x240 mode. I tried all three of these settings with varying results. The first problem that occurred was that when I took a picture, the results came out blurry. I first thought it was the resolution; however, when I increased the resolution from 640 to 1024, the photos still came out blurry. Then I thought it was my own unsteady hand. So I set the camera on the ground with the included tripod attached, and the pictures became less blurry, but the photos still seemed out of focus. Finally, I realized that the camera had a manual focus, meaning I had to set the focus according to the distance of my subject. The focus is controlled by a rotating dial on the lens, and rotates from a setting of closer than 2 inches to above 20 inches. When I took photos again with the focus set to a better setting, the pictures came out a bit clearer. Although, despite all of this tweaking, the photos still were grainy. The images are adequate for posting on the Internet or sending through emails, but are definitely not meant for printing; even the 1024 resolution comes out grainy. Other than that, the camera also comes with a timer setting, which allows it to shoot photos on a timer. This feature works perfectly.
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