Concord Eye-Q Go Wireless

CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
Detailed editors' rating
Design: 5.0
Features: 7.0
Performance: 4.0
Image quality: 4.0
Overall score: 5.0 (2.5 stars)
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Product summary

CNET editors' review

• Reviewed by: Eamon Hickey
• Edited by: Aimee Baldridge
• Reviewed on: 02/16/2005
• Released on: 01/15/2004

Concord's Eye-Q Go Wireless offers 2-megapixel resolution and Bluetooth wireless image transfer in a simple, inexpensive package with a fixed-focal-length lens. If your expectations are appropriately low, the camera won't disappoint you, but we see little value in the Bluetooth feature.

The highly portable, silver plastic body of the Go Wireless weighs only 4.5 ounces including battery and media, and it fits easily in a shirt pocket. Its construction isn't shoddy, but the feel of its body and the various buttons leaves no doubt about its low price. Most features are controlled via a four-way pad on the camera's back, but the operating logic of the associated menus, which are both inconsistent and somewhat inefficient, annoyed us a bit.

The Go Wireless's extremely simple feature set is exemplified by the 48mm lens (35mm-camera equivalent), which has three focus positions--macro, portrait, and distant--that are set manually with a sliding switch near the lens. Programmed automatic exposure is augmented by five scene modes, as well as exposure compensation to plus or minus 2EV. White-balance options include auto and three manual presets. You can record still images in JPEG format at three resolutions and three compression settings, and you can save them to the camera's 7MB of internal memory or to an SD/MMC card. In movie mode, the camera will capture 320x240 silent video to the limit of your memory capacity, and you can also use the Go Wireless as a Webcam.

With its low price in mind, we'd still rate the Go Wireless's sluggish performance as just barely forgivable. Start-up takes more than 9 seconds, shot-to-shot time is almost 4 seconds, and shutter delay is about 1 second.

The camera's Bluetooth image transfer made us shrug. You can move only one image at a time, and it takes three menu commands to make it happen; a 700K file took about 1 minute, 35 seconds to transfer from camera to computer. We moved the same file in about 1 second using a USB 1.1 card reader. True, the Go Wireless can send its images to printers, PDAs, and other Bluetooth devices that lack card readers or USB ports, but that strikes us as much less useful in real life than in, say, a marketing executive's fervent dreams.

The quality of our test shots from the Concord Eye-Q Go Wireless was mixed. Exposure accuracy, sharpness, and noise levels are all acceptable for its class. Colors are somewhat flat but not dramatically bad. But several of our pictures were badly marred by excessive blown-out highlights, a problem that requires much more exposure and Photoshop-doctoring than a very basic snapshot camera can rightly expect of its owners.

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