|
 A posh digital? If anyone could pull it off, it would be Contax, the company that brought you the T-series titanium film compacts. People were happily shelling out big bucks for the T3 and T VS III film-burners for two reasons: the cameras’ beautiful-yet-bulletproof construction, and (more important) the staggeringly good performance from their Zeiss lenses.
The new Contax T VS Digital is certainly beautifully made and flawlessly finished. And, as our test results show, it takes very sharp pictures with extremely high color accuracy.
These performance numbers, however, are middle-of-the-road for 5MP cameras that cost hundreds less than the T VS Digital. For reference, the magnesium-alloy-bodied Olympus Camedia C-5050 Zoom (tested April 2003, page 64) provides better image quality and higher color accuracy, at a street price nearly $300 less than the black-bodied T VS (along with a faster lens and high-end features such as a dedicated hot-shoe and full set of manual controls—the T VS offers only program and aperture-priority AE).
Unlike the film versions, which are positively petite, the T VS Digital is a standard-sized (i.e., pretty big) camera. With a viewfinder in the middle of the camera (where it needs to be to minimize parallax), the T VS collides squarely with your nose when raised to eye level. (Verticals are easier.) The diopter wheel is
difficult to impossible to adjust, depending on whether you wear eyeglasses or not. We do like the multi-button array around the jog dial, which keeps control menus sorted into much more manageable chunks than on other cameras. But there’s no quick-delete button; to dump a picture, you have to scroll through a menu. In short, we expected a Contax digital compact to knock our socks off. The T VS Digital merely loosened our shoelaces.
|
