Aiptek 5100M: a big jumping on quality

Picked up a tiny 5 megapixel/MPEG-4 recorder at Walmart yesterday for $94 that I thought would be fun to mess around with. The Aiptek webpage loves this thing, saying it "...provides a wonderful solution to let us closer to life." The page urges "[d]on’t let the wonderful moment sneak away from your fingers" and promises "You will have the most wonderful experience in your life." The specs on this thing seemed really good: 640x480 video and 2560x1920 still pictures. It's got 16 megs of internal memory and can support Compact Flash cards up to 512 megs.

At least, those are the apparent specs after perusing the back of the box for about 15 seconds. While not completely fabricated, those specs aren't entirely accurate. While it does shoot 640x480 video, it does it at 10 frames a second, which is great for shooting vaudeville-style hurdygurdy men but not exactly DVD quality. In only has a 3 megapixel image sensor and uses software to interpolate the image up to 5 megapixels. In this case "interpolate" means "just blow up bigger". Three of the onboard 16 megs of memory are taken up with the camera software, so only 13 are available for use. It does accept CF cards up to 512 megs, so the back of the box wasn't entirely inaccurate.

Here's a heavily retouched, scaled-down image of a nearby building.



And a link to the original, unretouched image (740k).

An OK picture, after cropping, scaling down and editing but the picture-taking part is supposed to be a bonus to the video. Not only is the low framerate at 640x480 a big deal, the videos are stored in some crazy .asf format that Macintoshes can't edit, rather than some standardized MPEG-4 variant. Why not at least .avi, Aiptek r&d? I'm willing to meet Windows users halfway on video formats here. I can play the .asf and they look like total garbage: all pixelated and awful. Not exactly the "most wonderful experience in my life".

To summerize: The picture it takes are adequate (if not the advertised resolution), the video is awful. The whole unit feels cheap and fragile, like a toy. The menus are serviceable and it comes with all sorts of extra doodads in the box: case and tripod and the like. If I could only have one $94 dollar camera, it wouldn't be this one.

This puppy's going right back to the store.