Gerard
04-13-2004, 03:41 PM
As with the thread linked from my other reviews, it seems the one relating to my Pretec CF camera review seems to have vanished. Either someone around here has been doing some spring cleaning, or there's a nasty flaw in the site database. Anyhow, here's a few comments to bring my old review up to date. That review is here (until it vanishes, I guess):
http://www.pocketnow.com/mobile.php?a=portal_detail&t=reviews&id=262
I sent lots of emails to various Pretec addresses over the year after purchasing the camera. I got the odd reply, from several different reps. One guy early on tried to help by hinting that the earlier revs of the software were superior, but apparently he wasn't allowed to say so exactly. He just sent me a sample image which wasn't too disgusting, and said that it was shot with a certain older version of the drivers, which were easily found on Pretec's site.
Another worker finally replied to me in the fall last year, one Rosa, who said that the previous correspondent was no longer with the company. I hope I didn't get him fired! Anyway, she and I engaged in a sporadic communication over about 3 months, with her answers taking many weeks to come. In early January, about a week before my one year warranty was to expire, she finally said that if I sent her my mail address she would send me an RMA form and that the 'defective' camera would be replaced. I immediately, that night, sent her my street address and any other contact information I could. I heard nothing from her, ever again. I re-sent the email several times, CC-ing it to myself to be sure that it was going out. I then sent it to other Pretec email addresses. Nothing back. They have stopped talking to me. My warranty came an went.
So, as Pretec has no honour, and as it seems that the little communication they troubled themselves to make was aimed at stalling me (as they have with at least one other Pretec camera user to my knowledge, and also with one large online store which has decided no longer to do business with this unreliable company), I am stuck with a camera displaying the following defects:
- shutter button 'falls' into the body, getting stuck, and often not triggering a picture - has behaved this way since the day I received the unit
- CMOS receptor which seems to suffer a resolution/focus defect (I'm guessing it's bent), as the left-most 1/4 of every picture is slightly out of focus
- a cracked spacer ring in the rotational hardware, which I finally mended after the warranty expired by taking the camera apart just a little - it's stopped clicking when I rotate the camera
- According to Frank Weseloh - who developed the software CECam - Pretec has built in only one hardware-controlled exposure setting. All adjustments in intensity and contrast are done via software. This explains why shots in direct daylight (even moderately overcast and often indoors near a window) are burned out in all the highlights. Most outdoor pictures of people make their faces plain paper white, with black dots for nostrils and eyes and mouths. Indoors in artificial medium to low light I can sometimes get very acceptable portraits, but I'd really prefer the camera work outside. Apparently the FlyCam offers 8 hardware-set exposure modes, offering drastically better exposure control, especially with CECam.
- Focus to infinity is just not possible as-is. I finally got sick of using software after the fact to sharpen backgrounds, as this just takes too much time and is never as good as shooting in focus to start with. Seeing that another local user of the Pretec has the same problem, I last week decided to pull the lens barrel apart and see if I could fix it. Sure enough, there is a pair of plastic stops on the inner barrel and a single one on the inside of the outer barrel, limiting focus to about 15 feet at the furthest and 8 inches at the closest. The inner focus mechanism is a simple threaded design, with a tensioning spring around it. By carving out the outer stop - a matter of a few seconds with a small and sharp carving gouge - I was able to make the camera focus to infinity, just another 6mm of rotation or so. As a bonus, it can now also focus to as close as about 60mm, 2.5 inches, for great low-light macro shots. This takes three full rotations of the focus ring from infinity, and is about as far as I dare rotate it for fear of having the whole lens apparatus fall out. As the outer barrel is glued to the face of the inner, this is strictly an at your own risk affair, but for anyone using this unfortunate camera I'd recommend it.
Those are the obvious hardware defects. Here's the subtler stuff, in software:
- Even the version 1.21 software, which seems the best of a bad lot (with 2.0 and 1.18 being pretty close to unusable and the more recent version being massively bloated with bitmap 'skin' files), still cannot capture decent video. The audio component is filled with a screaching whine, and the horrible pixelated distortion makes these videos pretty close to useless. On rare occassions, usually indoors with moderate light, these are slightly more usable. I haven't bothered to try the video in months, preferring the less nasty video from mmVision combined with my HP CF camera.
- refresh rate at full resolution is so slow as to make still photography impractical - it just takes far too long to try and get a properly aligned shot, then tap the icon onscreen to grab it because the hardware button won't work
- According to the developer of the CECam software, which he made to take better pictures with Pretec cameras and FlyCam cameras as well, Pretec's default '100%' quality setting is actually a 50% compression. That explains the nasty quality of my pictures, prior to my purchasing the CECam software in February. I sent him sample images taken with the Pretec and with his CECam software (the latter files being on average 6 times larger at his 100% quality setting), and his analysis showed that Pretec had crippled the camera in software. No true uncompressed JPEG at 1.3MP is possible with their software.
- Even just the boot time for the software renders the Pretec difficult to use as a camera - taking more than 8 seconds to launch on a 400MHz X-scale device is intolerable. If one needs a camera now, what good is having it take so long to start up? Even overclocked to 498MHz I find the software operates very sluggishly. CECam launches in about 1 second, easily matching almost any standalone digital camera and beating many. But CECam won't (yet) do video.
If anyone reading this has a Pretec camera and is anything like as unhappy with it as I have been, The lens focus modification and CECam software go a long way towards making this thing usable. I don't know if Frank is going to be able to add video, but apparently he's considering the problem. I've only been able to get a maximum of about 5fps out of his chain-exposure setting, even at smallest framesize and relatively poor compression, but this supplies sets of stills which can be assembled on a PC into silent 'movies' in animated GIF format (Ulead works well for this) or AVI (AVIEdit can use batches of JPEG images), so that's at least something useful. Still, sound would be good. You can find CECam here:
http://www.wincesoft.de/html/cecam.html
Sorry this can't be attached as a follow-up to my review thread. Seems something like this glitch has been part of pocketnow for a long time, as several of my reviews and even more threads have vanished in the past couple of years.
http://www.pocketnow.com/mobile.php?a=portal_detail&t=reviews&id=262
I sent lots of emails to various Pretec addresses over the year after purchasing the camera. I got the odd reply, from several different reps. One guy early on tried to help by hinting that the earlier revs of the software were superior, but apparently he wasn't allowed to say so exactly. He just sent me a sample image which wasn't too disgusting, and said that it was shot with a certain older version of the drivers, which were easily found on Pretec's site.
Another worker finally replied to me in the fall last year, one Rosa, who said that the previous correspondent was no longer with the company. I hope I didn't get him fired! Anyway, she and I engaged in a sporadic communication over about 3 months, with her answers taking many weeks to come. In early January, about a week before my one year warranty was to expire, she finally said that if I sent her my mail address she would send me an RMA form and that the 'defective' camera would be replaced. I immediately, that night, sent her my street address and any other contact information I could. I heard nothing from her, ever again. I re-sent the email several times, CC-ing it to myself to be sure that it was going out. I then sent it to other Pretec email addresses. Nothing back. They have stopped talking to me. My warranty came an went.
So, as Pretec has no honour, and as it seems that the little communication they troubled themselves to make was aimed at stalling me (as they have with at least one other Pretec camera user to my knowledge, and also with one large online store which has decided no longer to do business with this unreliable company), I am stuck with a camera displaying the following defects:
- shutter button 'falls' into the body, getting stuck, and often not triggering a picture - has behaved this way since the day I received the unit
- CMOS receptor which seems to suffer a resolution/focus defect (I'm guessing it's bent), as the left-most 1/4 of every picture is slightly out of focus
- a cracked spacer ring in the rotational hardware, which I finally mended after the warranty expired by taking the camera apart just a little - it's stopped clicking when I rotate the camera
- According to Frank Weseloh - who developed the software CECam - Pretec has built in only one hardware-controlled exposure setting. All adjustments in intensity and contrast are done via software. This explains why shots in direct daylight (even moderately overcast and often indoors near a window) are burned out in all the highlights. Most outdoor pictures of people make their faces plain paper white, with black dots for nostrils and eyes and mouths. Indoors in artificial medium to low light I can sometimes get very acceptable portraits, but I'd really prefer the camera work outside. Apparently the FlyCam offers 8 hardware-set exposure modes, offering drastically better exposure control, especially with CECam.
- Focus to infinity is just not possible as-is. I finally got sick of using software after the fact to sharpen backgrounds, as this just takes too much time and is never as good as shooting in focus to start with. Seeing that another local user of the Pretec has the same problem, I last week decided to pull the lens barrel apart and see if I could fix it. Sure enough, there is a pair of plastic stops on the inner barrel and a single one on the inside of the outer barrel, limiting focus to about 15 feet at the furthest and 8 inches at the closest. The inner focus mechanism is a simple threaded design, with a tensioning spring around it. By carving out the outer stop - a matter of a few seconds with a small and sharp carving gouge - I was able to make the camera focus to infinity, just another 6mm of rotation or so. As a bonus, it can now also focus to as close as about 60mm, 2.5 inches, for great low-light macro shots. This takes three full rotations of the focus ring from infinity, and is about as far as I dare rotate it for fear of having the whole lens apparatus fall out. As the outer barrel is glued to the face of the inner, this is strictly an at your own risk affair, but for anyone using this unfortunate camera I'd recommend it.
Those are the obvious hardware defects. Here's the subtler stuff, in software:
- Even the version 1.21 software, which seems the best of a bad lot (with 2.0 and 1.18 being pretty close to unusable and the more recent version being massively bloated with bitmap 'skin' files), still cannot capture decent video. The audio component is filled with a screaching whine, and the horrible pixelated distortion makes these videos pretty close to useless. On rare occassions, usually indoors with moderate light, these are slightly more usable. I haven't bothered to try the video in months, preferring the less nasty video from mmVision combined with my HP CF camera.
- refresh rate at full resolution is so slow as to make still photography impractical - it just takes far too long to try and get a properly aligned shot, then tap the icon onscreen to grab it because the hardware button won't work
- According to the developer of the CECam software, which he made to take better pictures with Pretec cameras and FlyCam cameras as well, Pretec's default '100%' quality setting is actually a 50% compression. That explains the nasty quality of my pictures, prior to my purchasing the CECam software in February. I sent him sample images taken with the Pretec and with his CECam software (the latter files being on average 6 times larger at his 100% quality setting), and his analysis showed that Pretec had crippled the camera in software. No true uncompressed JPEG at 1.3MP is possible with their software.
- Even just the boot time for the software renders the Pretec difficult to use as a camera - taking more than 8 seconds to launch on a 400MHz X-scale device is intolerable. If one needs a camera now, what good is having it take so long to start up? Even overclocked to 498MHz I find the software operates very sluggishly. CECam launches in about 1 second, easily matching almost any standalone digital camera and beating many. But CECam won't (yet) do video.
If anyone reading this has a Pretec camera and is anything like as unhappy with it as I have been, The lens focus modification and CECam software go a long way towards making this thing usable. I don't know if Frank is going to be able to add video, but apparently he's considering the problem. I've only been able to get a maximum of about 5fps out of his chain-exposure setting, even at smallest framesize and relatively poor compression, but this supplies sets of stills which can be assembled on a PC into silent 'movies' in animated GIF format (Ulead works well for this) or AVI (AVIEdit can use batches of JPEG images), so that's at least something useful. Still, sound would be good. You can find CECam here:
http://www.wincesoft.de/html/cecam.html
Sorry this can't be attached as a follow-up to my review thread. Seems something like this glitch has been part of pocketnow for a long time, as several of my reviews and even more threads have vanished in the past couple of years.