Product Reviews

Mention digital cameras, and the average technology buff will trot out something about how versatile they are - enabling you to make slideshows, send pics via e-mail and choose which ones to print. But what if you crave simplicity? After all, with a conventional compact camera, you just pop in a roll of film and start snapping. BenQ's new DC E40 aims to make digital photography just as easy.

Getting started is simple. Slide the lens cover back, and the camera pings to life. Shooting, playback, video and sound recording modes are selected using a sliding switch.

A touch-sensitive 1.5in preview screen at the back makes using the camera a breeze. To delete a picture just tap the wastebin icon below the screen.

Less impressive is the quality of the screen itself. In low light, people appear as dark silhouettes. Even in daylight, the image is grainy, making it impossible to tell if photos you've taken are in focus.

Camera settings are accessed

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by tapping another icon. These include letting you scribble on a comic moustache using a simple paintbrush tool. You can choose exposure modes and adjust picture quality (the level of compression used to reduce image file sizes), and resolution (the number of pixels that make up the picture). Resolution determines the level of detail in a picture - and it's here that BenQ cheats a little. The DC E40's CCD light sensor contains 4 million pixels, yet it offers a '6-megapixel' setting. This is achieved by 'interpolation' - basically, guessing the extra information. We don't like its digital zoom either. This magnifies the centre of the shot without adding any detail.

Exposure is determined by preset 'scene modes', geared towards landscapes, portraits and so on, which you can choose manually or automatically. In practice, foreground subjects in flash photos proved a little bright, and it struggled with high-contrast scenes, bleaching out bright areas, or losing detail in shadows.

Four-megapixel photos offer plenty of detail - but the camera's 8MB built-in memory can only hold four shots of this size. To add more, you'll need to buy an SD card. Focus isn't always spot-on - though this is only noticeable in close-up shots - and the lower picture quality setting produces blockiness due to JPEG compression.

The BenQ is easy to use, but it's the quality of photos that really counts. With hit-and-miss exposure and and a lack of detail in lower-resolution shots, we can't recommend it. Go for the similarly-priced FujiFilm Finepix A340.