Acer CU-6530 review

Previous Acer cameras have delivered high specifications at aggressively low prices, but the CU-6530 sees the company taking a different tack.

£194 is typical for a 6-megapixel camera, but the CU-6530 is considerably more compact and stylish than previous Acer models.

It's well specified in areas that don't usually make the headlines: the 21/2" LCD screen has a generous 230,000-pixel resolution and the camera comes with a 64MB SD card, a USB charging cradle and a protective case. The case had a strange fishy smell when we first unpacked it, but this dissipated after a few weeks. A li-ion battery is included, but it has quite a poor life.

The camera is easy to use, although the menus could be better laid out; regularly used settings appear at the bottom of the list of options. We don't like the all-or nothing approach to sounds: we find it useful to have a noise that indicates when a picture has been taken, but not every time a button is pressed. It's not particularly fast, either, taking between two and four seconds between shots, rising to six with the flash enabled. Continuous mode captures five shots in three seconds but takes 10 seconds to recover. There's a fair amount of user control, including light metering modes, a contrast control and automatic exposure bracketing.

In agreeable lighting conditions, this camera produced excellent pictures, and its macro mode was impressive. But in trickier conditions such as low light and during flash photography it often came unstuck, producing poorly exposed shots, and purple fringing was evident in high-contrast scenes.

This is Acer's best camera to date, but its image quality still leaves room for improvement.

Author: Ben Pitt