BenQ is a name that I associate with a certain je ne sais quoi in the technology world - take a dash of style, a shot of well considered design and a generous helping of innovation and what BenQ seem to produce is a product that stands out from the crowd. Don’t take my word for it though, in March of this year they received 6 Red-Dot awards across 5 of their product categories in addition to the 5 Good Design Awards that they picked up at the end of last year. Anyway, that’s quite enough BenQ trumpet blowing.
With this in mind, it was pretty exciting news last week when I heard that they had a new 10MP digital camera to add to their range. Even more so when I realised that it had an HD mode that takes pictures in 16:9 (1920 x 1080) format. It’s called the E1050t but it’s not to be confused with the E1050 and whilst they are obviously brothers that little ‘t’ makes a sizeable difference in terms of operation.
In a bid to do away with complicated menus and buttons, BenQ have implemented a touch screen interface that they claim offers a far simpler shooting and editing process – the replacement for [most of] the buttons is a 3 stage ‘Tap, Circle, Swipe’ operation.
Using the 3" LCD screen you ‘Tap to shoot’ instead of using the traditional shutter button, I didn’t realise the shutter button was so complicated! But seriously, as well as just tapping to take a picture you can also drag the focus frame across the screen to capture a fast moving subject and the E1050t will take the picture as soon as your finger is removed. Sounds pretty nifty to me!
Zooming is taken care of by the ‘Circle’ function; simply, to zoom in on any given area you just draw a circle around it on the screen with your finger. The camera then zooms in automatically to a 12X magnification, though a little disappointingly this BenQ only has a 3X optical zoom, the enlarged portion of the image can also be saved as a new image when using the zoom feature in picture editing mode.
Review of your pictures or videos is operated by the ‘swipe’ function - left to right for the next snap and right to left for the previous. Simple! You can control videos by tapping the playback bar from wherever you would like to begin viewing, eliminating the need to continually watch each from the beginning.
Aside of the unusual operation of this camera the rest of the features are generally the standard fair that you will have come to expect from your compact digital but other notable options include; an ISO range up to 3200 (though you will need to drop to 3MP or less to use it at this level) and several movie modes including a widescreen 16:9 (848×480) option and web sharing (640×480) mode, making it ideal for the YouTube generation. It is also compatible with SDHC cards up to 16GB like the one recently released by Sandisk, so running out of space on your memory card shouldn’t be too much of an issue.
Overall it seems as if BenQ are once again doing what they try to do best – innovating, whether the system will work well is a different question, I have a few doubts as to the ease of trying to compose a shot whilst holding the camera in one hand, zooming and then having to tap the screen to actually take the picture; perhaps implementing the other functions but leaving the option of a traditional shutter might have been better but i’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
Prices and release dates are yet to be announced for the UK but we’ll keep you updated when we know more. Stay tuned.