Hardware: Peripherals

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Toshiba PDR-M11 Review
By Eric Grevstad
November 9, 2001

You Get What You Pay For

The days when you needed $1,000 to get a decent digital camera are long gone. Heck, you don't even need half that, with a host of sharp 2-megapixel units with optical zoom and other features available for $300 to $400.
But most of us need to think twice before spending $400, and many of us only need a digital camera for posting small images on Web sites or e-mailing baby pictures to grandparents, not winning photography contests or framing 8 by 10-inch prints. If that describes you, Toshiba Imaging Systems' low bid is just $199 -- the price of its PDR-M11, a 1.3-megapixel, point-and-shoot camera with a comfortably compact (though not pocket-sized) design.
As you'd expect considering its low price, the PDR-M11 does not offer sophisticated manual controls like aperture or shutter priority (contrary to the specs on Toshiba's Web site -- Ed.), although it does let you adjust exposure (automatic, or -2.0 to +2.0 EV in 0.5 EV increments) and white balance (automatic, or outdoor sun, incandescent, or normal or cool fluorescent light). It captures only stills, not movies or video clips, and has no video-out port to show images on a TV set, though you can watch a timed slide show on its LCD monitor.
More limiting, it has a fixed-focus lens (F/2.8 to F/8.0, equivalent to 52mm on a 35mm camera) with no optical zoom, just a 2X digital zoom that fuzzily magnifies the center of an image. That means no macro or close-up mode (focusing range is 39.4 inches to infinity), and framing your shots the old-fashioned way -- by stepping back or walking forward.
There's a built-in flash with automatic, forced-on, forced-off, and red-eye reduction (preflash) modes, but it's pretty weak -- Toshiba rates its range as 3 to 10 feet, but we'd call it less. A self-timer gives you a two- or 10-second delay to get into a shot.

Combine those specs with simple controls, and you've got a beginner-friendly way to snap 1,280 by 960- or 640 by 480-pixel images, with a choice of three levels of JPEG compression or image quality plus an uncompressed TIFF format. You don't, however, get very impressive pictures: Most of the shots we took with the PDR-M11 were fair to middling, with some attempted close-ups or mixed sun-and-shadow indoor portraits coming out awful.
For the most part, resampling or shrinking 1,280 by 960 to smaller images for Web posting or 4 by 6-inch printing produced perfectly usable pics. But as hard as we tried to remember its price tag and forget the impressive 2- and 3-megapixel digital cameras we've tried lately, the PDR-M11 remained a disappointment -- it doesn't pass the "as good as a disposable camera" test.
Measuring 2.8 by 4.5 inches by 2 inches thick, the Toshiba weighs 11 ounces including the four AA batteries and 4MB SmartMedia card that reside under a hinged door on its bottom. Battery life is good -- we got three hours' shooting and fiddling from a set of alkalines, with the LCD monitor left on.
The supplied storage card, following Rule 1 of the Digital Camera Vendors' Guild, is too puny and will oblige owners to buy a higher-capacity replacement -- it holds precisely one 1,280 by 960 image in TIFF format and only five high-quality JPEG shots, though you can take as many as 77 lowest-quality 640 by 480 snaps.