Ricoh RDC-6000 1600X1200 2.1MP SER USB 4X DIG ZOOM MOTION AVI LCD WEB

WHAT ELSE: Ricoh's RDC-6000 has some nice extras for a sub-$300 camera. A movie setting lets you take video clips up to 1 minute and 11 seconds long, and there's a handy dial for adjusting the LCD viewfinder's brightness. The camera's most esoteric feature is its white balance control. It has the usual choices for daylight, fluorescent, and incandescent lighting, but you can also redefine each with a separate red-green-blue setting. And to help get you started with your custom settings, there's a calibration mode. The LCD shows the changes in white balance as you rotate through the settings. Other useful features include manual focus, automatic exposure bracketing, time-lapse mode, and a grid for the viewfinder that helps you keep your horizons level. Ricoh also offers an optional remote control for the RDC-6000. There's no optical zoom, but the camera does have a 4X digital zoom.

Operating some of the camera's controls can be a bit baffling at first. For example, the delete function is located on the main control dial, which is handy. But when you are ready to delete an image, the menu says "Start:Release"; you then need to push the camera's trigger to start the process. It would have been far clearer if it said something like "Press release to start." A PIC button on the top of the camera that lets you rotate through the image quality settings is faster than a menu setting, but it's somewhat slow to rotate from the best to the least. You can adjust the time for the instant image review (1,2, or 3 seconds), but the camera does not let you immediately delete shots you don't like. You also can't date-stamp a shot right on the image--the date is only stored along with the other image data that most JPEG files contain.

Ricoh packs a hefty bundle of software with this camera. ArcSoft's camera suite is definitely geared to home users: In addition to the usual image editing software, it includes PhotoFantasy 2000--an application that lets you make wacky images out of your photos.

BEST USE: Consider this model if you are looking for an inexpensive 2.1-megapixel camera and you're not too finicky about image quality.