BenQ T700 review

At 17mm thin, and only a little bigger than its 3in touchscreen, BenQ's T700 is likely to get noticed. Its 120g weight might go unnoticed in your pocket, though.

The lens and the onscreen menus appear to be the same as on Pentax's Optio T10 (Labs, Shopper December 2006). A touch screen isn't necessarily quicker than standard buttons, but it's a little easier to use and it is certainly more fun. We particularly like how it's possible to define up to four photographic settings that can be accessed simply by prodding anywhere on the screen. We're also taken by the on-camera editing options, which include the ability to cut out an area of a photo and stick it on to another.

Sadly, there's not much else to the T700 that we feel positive about. It took six seconds to switch on and take a picture, and subsequent shots were five seconds apart. The 0.43fps continuous mode and 188-shot battery life are among the worst we have seen for years. Manual focus is listed in the focus options, but selecting it didn't actually provide us with a manual focus control.

Video is recorded in MPEG4 format, giving decent quality and small file sizes, although audio was crackly. Photos were sharp, but there was evidence of heavy digital sharpening, with a halo of white around black text that didn't improve legibility. Colours were often strange, with yellow grass and purple branches in our outdoor tests. Noise-reduction processing smudged detail in pictures taken indoors, but noise was still pretty heavy at ISO settings above 160.

The T700 is a case of style over substance. It's not a terrible camera, but image processing is far behind the standards set by the leading digital camera manufacturers.

Author: Ben Pitt