BenQ has its finger in a lot of pies, and one of them is digital cameras. It has recently stepped up the ladder in the Great Hunt For Megapixels, coming up with the DC C1000 which churns out ten of them.
The DC C1000 is not going to wow you if stylish hardware is your thing. Its black and silver, plastic and metal casing is not particularly pretty and overall the camera is chunky (89 x 60.5 x 32.7mm) and heavy (140g before you insert the two AA cells that power it). However, we do have to say in its favour that it feels solid in the hand and that its controls are nicely located, for right-handed users anyway.
But if you want all those pixels, a range of options that'll let you play about quite a bit and fairly easy to use controls - and if you aren't interested in splashing out a lot of cash - then this camera is going to attract your attention.
Be aware that pixels aren't everything, and it is annoying that the DC C1000 is stuck with just a 3x optical zoom facility. You can add another 4x with digital zoom but digital zoom is always best left alone as image quality degrades when you use it. Fortunately you can disable it completely on this camera.
We found two other annoyances during testing. The burst mode shoots four images in quick succession, but you don't get a shutter sound to tell you when these are being shot. We also found that indoors the camera is a bit of a let-down with its less-than-wonderful flash.
There are, though, quite a few goodies. There are plenty of 'scene modes': fireworks, sports, text, close-up, sunset, backlight, beach and snow, kids, night scene, landscape and portrait. In addition there are four settings which allow you different amounts of control to configure your own preferences, limiting you to fiddling with aperture, shutter, both of these, or all available settings.
You can resize images on the camera, too. Naturally enough you can only go downwards, and this feature might be handy if your memory cards start to get full and you have some shots you'd rather not delete. You can set your own image of choice for the startup screen too, which gives a little added fun.
The DC C1000 comes with some software to get you started on image management and editing, a carrying case, PC connection cable and a cable to connect the camera to a TV for those all-important family viewings of pictures and video shot during the day.
