What can you say about Creative divi-cam 525D?

Question

Does it produce good quality pictures?

Answer 1

I've reviewed a couple of these cameras this week and I'm always surprised by the manufacturer’s outrageous claims. On the whole, the 525D looks like an average product.
It's not the greatest for video but it gets the job done. For still pictures however, any camera with 3x optical zoom would be better. I suppose the 525D makes up for this by doing a bunch of other things too (it's also an mp3 player, also video recorder, etc.) But in general, this is also the problem with these devices - they are like Swiss army knives that can do a hundred things... poorly.
Here are Creative's specs for the 525D: http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=118&subcategory=309&product=15259
And here's the highlights:
* "High-resolution video" is a small lie. It can do 640x480 lines at 30fps. This is as good as most camcorders, but I'd hardly call VGA 'high resolution'.
* "Capture up to 11-megapixel pictures" is an outright lie. It only has a 5-megapixel sensor. It pulls the other 6-megapixels out of nowhere with a software trick. You can do the same thing with any 5-megapixel camera on you computer. Better.
* "capture distant objects clearly, without sacrificing image quality." is another outright lie. It has 8x digital zoom but NO optical zoom. When you use 8x digital zoom, the camera only records 0.6 megapixels (5 megapixels divided by 8x zoom). This is worse than most phone cameras!
* "Get high quality video and photos - day or night." Yet another outright lie. According to this site http://www.photokina-show.com/0062/creative/camcorder/creativedivicam525d/ the 525D has an ISO-range of 50-200. This makes the 525D completely useless at dusk. (And don't for a minute believe that that link is an objective review - it's an advert.)