I was browsing around on eBay the other week and happened to come across these DV182 digital video cameras made by DigiGR8. They were about £33 including postage from Hong Kong so I thought why not.

The only other bits I needed to get it going was an SD Memory Card & 2 AA batteries. After a quick raid of the desk draws, I had them.

It took around 10 days to arrive and I rushed to get it up and running. So far only a 33 quid camera, How good would it be. I shot some video and took some pictures. It gave good results when you consider the cost of the thing.

3.1 MEGA PIXELS Hardware Resolution on the Digital Camera
320×240 Video Resolution
4x Digital Zoom
5 Glasses Lens

The zoom is a bit of a let down, It does say “in video recording”, but mine will only zoom when in Snap Shot Camera Mode. Being a digital zoom, it is not really worth using, you can zoom and crop picture at that quality on your computer later.

Photo’s are good quality and are about Xmb in size. Video is recorded into AVI format and at abut 2.5Mb per min its not a bad size.

I have just ordered a 1Gb SD Card (To upgrade from the 64Mb one I had lay around) and think I will get around 6:30 hours of video on it.

Webcam? Well, I have used it as a webcam in a Skype conference on a Windows XP system as a test, but that’s about it. I have webcam’s already and am not going to use that feature much at all.

Downloading Pictures & Video: I have connected this to a Windows XP System and the device appears in My Computer as a Hard Disk, you can then copy off the files (.jpg and .avi). I will be connecting it to my Fedora System in the morning so I will update this blog post to reflect that.

Overall: I am very pleased with it. It has a few little problems but overall a bargain at that price. One of the chaps at work has bought one too having seen mine.