Description:

For less than $200 on the tab, this nifty little gadget looks and sounds very promising – a 28mm wide 5x optical zoom lens, 8-megapixel sensor, Face Detection mode, and a large 3-inch LCD screen. It even has connectivity to your direct current, an AV cable as well as your trusty USB adapter. Add to all that the video mode and the compact 99mm(W) × 60.1mm(H) × 25.7mm(D) dimensions. What more can you ask for? Apparently, quite a few. The powerful lens on this mid-range camera takes a while to focus, especially when you use the lens at its highest possible setting. And watch out for the shakes – it does not have powerful enough stabilizers to make up for that. When you use the macro lens mode, the flash does not adapt to the distance. If you combine the zoom and the macro mode, your subject has to be at least six inches away for you to have a decent shot. On the upside, it has very few external controls that tend to confuse the amateur photographer. This means that it’s in the strictly point-and-shoot category. It also has a built-in red-eye correction and the flash is powerful enough to cover a good distance, which is very useful in backlit scenarios. The E850 features panoramic stitching, so you can combine three images of a wide scene into a single photo. Even the enjoyment of the photos is made easy. After you’ve taken all your shots (and videos!) you have a good number of options in retrieving them by viewing them on the large LCD screen on the camera itself – use the thumbnails for easy browsing, zoom in or out at specific photos, add sound bites, view the photos in a slide show, change photo sequence, resize, rotate or even protect images. On the whole, the GE E850 digital camera is a user-friendly camera. It does not compare to anything a hobbyist should be using but it should do very well for the average Joes and soccer moms out there.