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Where The Handcam Falls Short On Picture Quality
Below is a 640 X 480 shot of my ugly mug. The size of the subject (me) has not been altered, but the photo has been cropped so it doesn't take as long to load here on this website.
Despite proper lighting (light source was above and behind the camera), proper focus, proper camera setting (portrait) and a fair distance from the camera (about 4 feet), there is some serious quality loss in the form of lost pixels. The photo looks almost "washed out".
Despite the convenience of the Handcam, this limits the usefulness. For example, when taking close up pictures of computer hardware for reviews for SLCentral, I prefer my regular digital camera because what I tend to do is take a larger than necessary photo (at LEAST 640X480) and then crop and zoom on the aspect of that photo that pertains most to the subject at hand. For example: taking a picture of an entire motherboard, but then zooming in on the Northbridge chip.
If I were to do this with the Targus Handcam, my initial photo would be 640 X 480 at the most, and if I were to zoom into that picture to bring focus to a particular aspect, the picture would only be blurrier and more washed out than the already washed out original.
So what kind of photos was the Handcam good for? My wife, a teacher, found herself using it at meetings to take pictures of co-workers. These photos then found their way onto the school's web site where the pictures did not need to exceed 320 X 240. So in a nutshell, it's safe to say that this camera is definitely good for taking portrait style pictures that don't exceed 320 X 240, as well as movies of similar size and subject matter. Scenery is also good subject matter for this camera (such as the photo of my oak tree), but again, without cropping and zooming and not exceeding 320 X 240.
This "limitation" also applies to the movies one can make with the Handcam and the best rate the Handcam can capture with these videos at is 8 fps. They look fine at 320 X 240, but the "wash out" effect seems to take place at higher resolutions just as they do with still photos.
What do you do when you're done taking photos?
So now that we've shot all of our photos and movies, what do we do with them?
Here's where the manual was frustrating again. After looking through the manual a couple times for the instructions on dialing in the lens and not finding it, I would've thought I would have run into how to get the pictures off of the camera. What I concluded, after not finding what I was looking for, for the second time, was that you COULDN'T retrieve images directly from the camera!
What I found in the manual is that you can move pictures and movies from your Handspring's memory to the Handcam's 2MB of memory in order to free up your Visor's memory. I had thought that once this was done, one could simply plug the Handcam into the computer's USB port and download those pictures into the PC.
Apparently not.
Pictures can, however, be shuttled from the Visor to the PC another way. The PC that has your Visor's cradle hooked up to it can have the Targus software installed on it and then, when you synch your Visor with that PC, the pictures will be moved into a default folder on that PC.
This is great, except for one thing. In my house, the Visor's cradle is hooked up to the PC and the camera is currently hooked up to my laptop. There's no way that I know of to get the pictures stored on the camera onto my laptop without having to take the Visor cradle off of the PC and installing it on my laptop, software and all. Grr.
>> More Than A Camera For A Handspring
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