Concord DVx

By billing itself as the "Swiss Army Knife of Digital Cameras," the DVx digital still/video camera has a lot to live up to in terms of quality and multi-functionality. We admire how Concord squeezed so many features into a surprisingly thin 6.5-ounce body-including an MP3 player, voice recorder, and even an LED flashlight, the company gets low marks for execution.

The digital video capabilities on the DVx seem decent on paper, with the device able to capture MPEG-4 quality movies at 640 x 480-pixels up to 15 frames per second. We liked how easy it was to select the movie mode using the colored tile menu system, but our experience went downhill from there.

The clips we captured were murky in anything less than extremely bright light. Even shooting directly at a lamp with some natural light in the room looked like a scene from the Blair Witch Project, with just the area around the glow of the bulb illuminated. When played back on a computer, the movie clips didn't fare any better, looking dim and noisy with green streaks running through the dark areas.

By contrast, the video sound quality is excellent. This trait carried over to the DVx's Voice Recorder, which out of all six modes produced the best results. You can fit around 120 minutes of recordings on the included 32MB memory card, but if you want to use the DVx for more than that we suggest upgrading to a 512MB card or larger.

Using a two-megapixel CMOS sensor, images taken with the Digital Still Camera were just average, with a hazy, opaque sheen masking several of them. The rotating 230-degree lens is a unique touch, but other than shooting self-portraits we didn't see any need for it. Worse, the camera has no optical zoom; only a 4X digital zoom which degrades the image quality.

Concord deserves credit for giving users creative control over their shots. You can add five color effects to images, adjust LCD brightness levels to shoot in different lighting conditions, select white balance settings, center-weighted metering, and choose from several flash settings.

The DVx's MP3 player produced mixed results, with the biggest problem being the difficulty in loading songs onto the device from a computer. After several failed attempts, we were finally able to find the appropriate folder on the DVx to allow tunes to play. Sound quality was not bad, if a little tinny.

The last two features on the DVx, its ability to act as a card reader and built-in flashlight, seem a bit gratuitous. Since most cameras that hook to a computer through a USB cord act as card readers, we don't see this as a unique benefit. The LED flashlight, which shines at three levels of brightness, would've been better if we could've figured out how to use it to lighten scenes shot with the digital video camera.

Overall, the DVx does a lot for the price, but we think a 6-in-1 device should perform at least half of the functions well to justify the investment.