Logitech Pocket Digital Review

It should be obvious by now that the Pocket Digital is about amazingly tiny size and happily low price, not about prize-winning photography. After taking several hundred pics, our opinion of its image quality had changed almost as many times, from poor to fair to good and back, but a few conclusions are clear.

To begin with, we'll repeat our advice to stick with the smaller or native sensor resolution and use PC software if you want to enlarge a pic to bigger-than-VGA size later: Images that came out of the camera at the 1,280 by 960 setting were uniformly as pixelated or grainy as ones we've seen from low-priced cameras' fake digital zoom.

With neither a zoom lens nor LCD monitor, it takes some practice to frame shots properly -- subjects that filled the tiny viewfinder proved to be only an off-center portion of the captured image. The same goes for the Pocket Digital's Instamatic-style fixed/infinite focus, although shots at its closest range (about two feet), while hardly as sharp as the macro-mode closeups of more costly digital cameras, were often a pleasant surprise. The featherweight Logitech, however, is very vulnerable to camera shake; without a steady hand, you'll get blur or even kaleidoscope effects.

And without a flash, it goes without saying that you'll get your best results outdoors on sunny days, or at least in brightly lit rooms. The camera touts what its OEM designer SMaL Camera Technologies calls Autobrite exposure-control technology to accommodate varying light levels within a scene, as when shooting someone backlit by a window, and we'll give it a B -- portions of an image that some cameras would leave as pitch black do indeed show some detail (occasionally at first glance, often when retrieved or rescued by your image-editing program's contrast- or color-enhancement functions). But try to tweak brightness or contrast too far, or shoot in an averagely dim room, and the Pocket Digital is drowned out; images look like still frames from a video camcorder at best, blotchy garbage at worst.

Here Comes the Bride

To cut to the chase, here are four images we took (none, as it happens, in direct sunlight). Except for being cropped (only part of the 640 by 480-pixel originals shown), these three are unretouched and unadjusted:

This fairly dark indoor image responded to contrast and brightness enhancement (as well as cropping) with Jasc Software's Paint Shop Pro 7:

Bottom line? We think it's as simple as print versus screen: If you want a digital camera whose images you can print and frame on a shelf or wall, even sticking to 3 by 5- or 4 by 6-inch size, the Pocket Digital will disappoint. But if you're e-mailing family-picnic snapshots to Grandma, or using software to shrink images to smaller-than-VGA resolution for Web posting, it's cool and convenient as well as a conversation piece.

And it's the only digital camera we've ever tested that made us temporarily panic, thinking we'd left it in a shirt pocket in the laundry.

Skip To Page 1 No Big Prints, But 52 Wallet-Sized • 2 Image Quality and Shooting Samples (190K total)

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