Operation:
Now we have to keep in mind this is an entry level camera with a price below $80 (US) and is going to be evaluated as such. With a 3.2 MegaPixel rating, the C300 simply can not be compared to the high MegaPixel cameras available today. With that in mind I was fairly surprised at the quality of the pictures the C300 was capable of producing on the high quality setting. On the high quality setting the C300 produces pictures in the JPEG format at a resolution of 2080x1544.
The mode knob on the top of the camera has three setting which are auto, night, and movie. The names pretty much tell you what each is for. On the back of the C300 there are a total of 10 buttons which include Delete, Menu, Review, Flash, Share, OK/Enter, and four direction buttons for scrolling and zooming.
The use of the different buttons is pretty self explanatory and the rather extensive User's Manual will clear up any questions you may have on their use, so I will skip the long winded explanation of each button.
My biggest complaint with the C300 is the lack of any optical zoom. The C300 only zoom capability is a 5X digital zoom, and as anyone who has ever used digital zoom will tell you, image quality suffers drastically when used. The two pictures below show just how much the digital zoom degrades image quality. The left picture is with no zoom and the right picture was taken at 5X digital zoom
Other than the lack of optical zoom I was very pleased with the performance of the C300. It truly is a point and shoot type of camera that is extremely easy to use, and it produces decent pictures for a camera in this price range and with only a 3.2 MegaPixel rating. These two pics are samples of just turning the camera on, pointing and shooting (full size images are as they were downloaded from the camera with no editing).
Two more images resized to 800x600...
