Caplio RR660 review

This unassuming 6-megapixel camera is short on exciting or unusual features, but has an appealing price.

The 2.4" screen injects a little luxury into the otherwise plain design, although at 110,000 pixels it's not detailed. Power comes from a pair of AA batteries and, as usual, only disposable batteries are supplied, so you'll need to spend an extra £15 on rechargeable NiMH cells and a charger.

The controls are simple but effective, with a familiar layout of buttons for the most common options and a menu for more advanced settings. However, its sounds are less appealing: there's a choice of an unpleasant high-pitched bleep or an even more unpleasant higher-pitched bleep each time you press a key; neither mode results in any sound as you take a picture, the one time we like some aural gratification for our actions. Thankfully, sounds can also be turned off altogether.

The autofocus is accurate but ridiculously slow. There's a lag of up to four seconds between pressing the shutter-release button and a picture being captured, which makes action shots impossible. Continuous mode captures three shots at one-second intervals, but in Single Shot mode the slow autofocus means pictures average at a speed of one every five seconds.

Image quality brought its own set of problems. There was plenty of detail in our test shots, but a large number of them were slightly underexposed. High-contrast shots suffered from blooming and purple fringing, giving a halo of white or purple around the edges of bright objects, and skin tones looked pasty under the flash. At other times, colour accuracy was often excellent but occasionally messed up badly for no apparent reason.

Our list of complaints perhaps paints an unfairly critical view of the RR660's image quality, but those on a tight budget don't need to settle for slow operation or mediocre image quality.