CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 05/13/2005
- Released on: 03/15/2005
Weighing slightly more than a pound, the Elura 85 sports a silver-plastic shell that doesn't quite have as high-end a look as the titanium-colored casings on the Elura 80 and Elura 90, but it shares those cameras' solid, well-balanced, and comfortable feel.
Welcome design elements include a top-loading tape door and rear-mounted battery, which allow you to reload without removing the camera from its tripod. A stereo microphone sits below the lens, and the Elura 85 has a jack for an external microphone, a feature that's absent on the Elura 80.
The 18X zoom lens has almost as much reach as the 20X lens that's found on the top-of-the-line Elura 90, but the Elura 85 doesn't bundle the wide-angle adapter that comes with that model. (Optional wide-angle and 1.5X teleconverter attachments are available.) The digital zoom--a feature that's not very useful due to image degradation--can be set to 72X or 360X. You can record video at standard 4:3 TV dimensions or at a true wide-screen 16:9 ratio.
The Elura 85 sports a fully automatic Easy mode, which you'll find welcome when you flip open the 2.5-inch LCD to discover 10 control buttons packed tightly together. For everyday shooting, you can leave the automatic mode engaged and use the buttons for control only during playback.
The camera's complement of analog and digital ports includes FireWire, USB, and analog RCA inputs and outputs for audio and video, but no S-Video.
You'll find a typical array of automatic exposure modes, including Sports, Portrait, Spotlight, Low Light, and Sand & Snow. In addition to a slow-shutter mode, the Elura 85 features an LED that illuminates nearby objects in dark situations, though the lamp is weaker than the one found on the Elura 90. The camera boasts a number of manual settings, including exposure, focus, white balance, and shutter speed. You focus manually with a jog dial that's mounted between the LCD and the lens, which isn't the easiest spot to reach when shooting. The dial doesn't offer the speed or precision you'd get from a focus ring, either. There's a selection of built-in faders, and an assortment of gimmicky digital effects such as Mosaic, Sepia, and Color Mask.
In good lighting conditions, the Elura 85 shoots decent camcorder-quality still images at 1,280x960 or 640x480. Despite its built-in flash, indoor shots are somewhat muddy compared to brightly lit outdoor images. However, as with the Elura 80 and Elura 90, this camera can snap 640x480 photos while you're recording video on a MiniDV cassette. The camera can also capture MJPEG AVI movies at 320x240 or 160x120 pixels. A 16MB MMC card is included for saving stills and AVI clips; the camera can also use SD cards.
In daylight and brightly lit situations, the Elura 85 records vibrant, sharp video. Colors are accurate, edges are crisp and well-defined, and textures are very evident. The 18X lens found on this camera and on the Elura 80 seems to provide slightly less contrast than the 20X lens on the Elura 90, but the difference is evident only in direct comparisons.
Low-light images have more accurate and saturated color than we've seen from similar consumer camcorders, but they're also noticeably noisy. The LED is relatively dim, and only reaches subjects quite close to the camera. The light works with the slow-shutter Night Mode to provide reasonable color in dark situations, but in very dark situations, the shutter speed is extremely slow, rendering motion very blurry. For shooting in dim situations, consider buying the Elura 90 or using an external light.
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- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 8 reviews
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2 out of 2 people found this helpful
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1 out of 1 people found this helpful
"I dont know about the tape stuff, but its working fine for me"
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