Agfa's Point-and-Clik Camera

Digital cameras offer a lot of flexibility with respect to storage, but that flexibility can cost you. CompactFlash, Memory Stick, and SmartMedia memory cards for storing images are pricey, typically costing $3 to $6 per megabyte. Agfa's $440 EPhoto CL30 Clik digital camera provides a unique and cost-effective alternative: It saves images to Iomega's 40MB Clik media, at a cost of 40 cents or less per megabyte.

But while the EPhoto CL30 Clik offers loads of inexpensive storage, there's a trade-off, as the Clik drive slows down the camera's operation. The camera suffers from a clunky design, as well.

Function, but Not Form

The first thing you'll notice about the CL30 is its form factor, a boxy shape that's reminiscent of a 1960s 35mm range-finder film camera. The camera is awkward to handle and hold, making one-handed shooting difficult. Still, using the camera's features is rather simple. Besides the dime-size silver shutter button on top, there are only three switches on the camera. Two of the switches control such basics as on/off, record/play, LCD on/off, and PC connection, and the other switch--dubbed the EasyPilot switch--navigates through the setup, preferences, and features menus. To select a mode, you must first push the appropriate switch into place. Although that setup takes a few minutes to get used to, in our tests it quickly became second nature for us.

Unlike other cameras, the CL30's navigation control panel is situated just above the LCD viewfinder screen. That location proves eminently sensible and convenient, particularly when you're framing shots using the LCD. The LCD screen itself is bright and legible, but it doesn't refresh smoothly, and the color often aliases (splits into different shades) if you move quickly.

The CL30 has neither an autofocus feature nor an optical zoom lens, though it features manual zone focus--macro, portrait, or distant--and a 2X digital zoom. Although the main lens cannot be fully removed, the front element unscrews, allowing you to attach optional filters or auxiliary wide-angle and telephoto lenses. By not stacking one lens on top of the other, this design should yield sharper image quality than the typical arrangement for digital cameras, in which auxiliary lenses screw directly onto the entire main lens.

The CL30's look isn't all that's a bit retro. The camera uses a 1-megapixel CCD that produces images in a resolution of 1152 by 864 pixels--admittedly a far cry from today's high-end 3-megapixel cameras. While that resolution is fine if you plan to output your images to the Web or your computer screen, keep in mind that you won't want to print 1-megapixel images as anything larger than a 5-by-7-inch photo. If you want your digital images to double as prints, you may want to consider a 2-megapixel camera, which you can find for under $500 as well.

Overall, the CL30's image quality is as good as what we've seen from other 1-megapixel digital cameras. Colors are pleasing, and enhanced contrast helps produce sharp, in-focus images. However, images have a grainy look when shot in less than ideal light. Agfa's PhotoGenie interpolation technology pushes the top resolution to 1440 by 1080 pixels, which is what you usually get from a 1.5-megapixel optical digital camera. The PhotoGenie mode worked reasonably well for some shots, but for others it seemed to do nothing but increase the file size.