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The new DC210 digital camera (street price $840) looks and feels like a welldesigned 35mm point-and shoot camera, yet it offers a slew of unique digital features and the highest true resolution (864x1152 pixels) of any digital camera in its price class. Could this be the first digital camera that finally gives its film counterparts a run for the money?
To find out, I brought this little beauty (5.2 x 3.2 x 1.9 inches) to a family wedding reception to see how it behaved as a camera. Then I subjected it to a battery of resolution and color tests in PoP PHOTO's lab. Wedding receptions are notoriously difficult environments for picture taking. That's why I usually leave my SLR at home and bring a trusted autofocus zoom point-andshoot with flash. It's easier to carry and doesn't cause cardiac arrest if someone drops a bit of wedding cake on it. But not being able to see through the lens at the moment of exposure still means getting back my fair share of out-of-focus faces, blurred action, and close-but-nocigar shots of subjects turning away from the camera.
Thanks to the instant playback feature on the DC210, all of these problem shots disappear, or shall I say, are erased? For ten seconds after each exposure, the DC210 displays the image on a 1.8-inch color LCD, offering the opportunity to save or delete. With in-camera editing, you get to show off only your best shots, which improves your picture-taking prowess for those who don't know about the bloopers you've erased. Eliminating the bad ones also gives you more room to store the good ones on the camera's removable 4MB compact flash card (13-31 images in high-res mode, 28-59 in low-res 640x480-pixel capture).
I've never had as much fun photographing a reception as I had with the DC210. The WOW! factor of this camera is tremendous. From the front it loo like a typical upscale point and-shoot, which led many subject to say: "Let me know how that shot came out and send me a print if does." My response would startle them. "It came out great! What's your e-mail address?" This invariably led to a small gathering around the camera (the WOW!...