i-JOY by MobiDV H12

I bought the iJoy while I was on a business trip in California. I saw a Fry's Electronics ad, and it looked interesting. retails for something around $200, but was on sale for $99. Right in my price range. I went to Fry's to look for it, and found it in the video camera area, instead of in the digital camera area. It is billed as a video camera, so I guess that makes sense.

You can read a review by someone else on the iJoy here. (The page is slow to load, but has lots of pictures.)

Anyway, The first words out of the sales person's mouth I spoke with were; "The battery only lasts 30 minutes". To which I responded; "Thank you", ignoring them completely. I should have listened. You see, I had recently bought a DDV-S670 which uses an NP-60 Li battery, and it seems to have pretty good battery life, running around an hour on a charge when taking stills or video. So, when I saw the iJoy, I figured that it would have a similar battery, and similar performance. Big mistake. The iJoy uses a 3.7 volt 780mAh Li battery, that thinks it is about out of energy after 10 to 15 minutes of recording. (The DDV-S670 has a 3.7 vold 1050mAh Li battery.) In fact the iJoy only shows full for a couple of minutes after charging, so I suspect the camera simply doesn't fully charge the battery completely. By the way, I tried to get another batter, so I could have a spare. It is supposed to use a Nokia N7210 battery, but I couldn't find one at Fry's, no luck there.

The iJoy is a fixed focus camera, and unlike some low cost cameras, it doesn't have a macro selector, so you get what you get. Overall, given the fairly wide lens, this arrangement works ok. Next to the lens, you will see the flash, which consists of two high intensity white LEDs. These can be used for flash stills, constant illumination while videoing, and as a flash light to help you see where you are going. They work fairly well in very low light, but in normal room light, they don't seem to have any effect for flash fill, so don't bother. By the way, my comments on the short battery life, wee not because of the LED flash, I did not normally use it, and the problem is not related to the flash.

In terms of features, it has lots.

Under Photo Basic settings you can manually control exposure, use center, central, or averaging light meter, manually select shutter speed, which is interesting since it is fixed apature, so you are really just adjusting exposure. You can adjust image size and image quality. Neither of these last tow have much effect on the actual results, but you can do it. Under Advanced settings you can set effects None/red/green/blue filter or Sepia, ISO speed 100/200/400, burst mode on/off. Self timer on/off anddate stamp on/off.

Under Video settings, there are similar adjustments, along with a setting to prefer faster shutter rate for sports, or more light for night time shooting.

It all seems like a pretty sophisticated camera, I wish it was as good as it appears. Of course I don't want to forget to mention that it is an MP3 player, and a voice recorder, as well as a flash light. Seems the only thing they left out is the FM radio.

I suppose by now you are wondering what kind of pictures it takes. Well, here is a simple picture taken out my office window;



Click the image to the right to see the 1024x768 version.

Stills: This photo was originally 2MP, and has been resized down to 1024x768. It isn't too bad, though it seems a little dark and flat. It claims to take pictures up to 5MP, but they are just doing some pixel expanding in the camera, and the actual resolution is still only 2MP. I would call it usable for stills.

Video: I don't have an example for you, because this camera uses the dreaded Microsoft ASF formatted version of MPEG4, which can not be easily used on any web site I know of. I'm sure many of you will correct me as soon as I post this. I can tell you that it takes 640x480 video at 15fps, at least in decent light. With low light, the frame rate slows to allow more light accumulation. In very low light, there is lots of visible smearing with motion, something which consider acceptable. The video quality was ok, it even simulates optical zoom, using the extra resolution of the sensor to prevent image degradation while zooming, at least up to about 2.4X. beyond that, the video image degrades because of resolution loss.

Conclusion: All in all, even with a file format of .ASF. Videos can be played on the Macintosh with VLC. I would consider this camera worthy, if it had decent battery life. It doesn't, so I can't even recommend it to my Windows only friends.

Rating: ** out of 5