By Raul

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Performance

Imaging performance

Indoors* artificial light	Outdoors* clear sky	Outdoors* overcast	Outdoors* night
Indoors flourescent	Indoors incandescent	Indoors natural light	Outdoors low light

Picture quality, in a word, sucks. In addition to the CCD itself being small (in terms of pixels), the lens used is not very good. It is a general-purpose lens that requires, much like a disposable camera does, that the subject be at least 24-36" away. Because of the small, lightweight nature of the device, it is easy to move the lens while pressing the button to shoot a picture. It is advisable, especially in low light, to rest the device when shooting.

There is no way to manually control the exposure, which is definitely a drawback. All you can do is pan the unit back and forth slightly and try to get it to look the best before you snap. That said, the camera performs relatively well in indoor settings with relatively low light. There is no flash, so photos won't come out in very dark areas. Outdoors, the camera takes fine pictures, but the catch-22 is that Palm IIIc screens have a tendency to go "black" outdoors in direct sunlight. So it is often a struggle to make out the preview before you snap the shot.

Hardware/physical performance

The PalmPix camera itself is solidly constructed and compact. With your Palm in one pocket, it's fairly easy to carry the PalmPix in the other. The lens has a rubber guard around it, which, along with another rubber guard on the face of the PalmPix allow you to set the Palm down face-up with the PalmPix attached (the PalmPix facing down). When attached, the PalmPix is unobtrusive enough to allow comfortable use of the Palm device. The snap-on attachment method is solid, even more so than the spring-loaded catches on the Palm modem. By leaving the Palm cover open 90 degrees, you can set the PalmPix/Palm combo on a flat surface to take timed shots.

Battery drain on the Palm seems negligible. I say seems because I sync my Palm IIIc every night, and that means the battery rarely drops below 90% charged. I once unplugged the AC adaptor to get an idea how long the IIIc would run without charging -- after three days it was at 59%, and that included use of the PalmPix. The Photolife batteries the PalmPix came with lasted about 260 shots. I am sure that number will vary depending on how long you run the preview mode and other factors.

Software performance

The image management software scores very high marks for functionality. The touch-screen interface Palms use makes it possible to randomly access the images you've stored -- something no digital camera can do (you have to thumb through images sequentially on every digital camera I've seen). The user interface is streamlined and can be learned without reading any instructions. Naming, categorizing and previewing files can be done literally in seconds.

The image previews themselves are in 256 colors, which means that there is usually a lot of banding/color distortion. But they do provide enough detail to tell whether to keep an image or to chuck it to make room for a better one.

Taking pictures with the PalmPix is very easy, and hard to screw up. The PalmPix/Palm combo is much less noticeable than a camera. Bring a camera out, and people all of a sudden act differently. Bring out a Palm, and nobody seems to notice. Often, you'll get interesting pictures because of this. Although the image quality is poor, convenience and versatility is high -- and a relatively low-quality picture is better than no picture at all.

As a Webmaster of an informal site, I find myself using my PalmPix a lot. I used to carry around a film camera and a telefoto lens, but the PalmPix has supplanted it for all but the serious photography missions. Despite its limitations, you do get all the benefits of digital imaging -- no film or processing costs, no wait to see images, no worries about someone seeing your "questionable" images (not that I'd know anything about that), etc. And it all travels to your PC via the hotsync cradle you already have installed.