The Genius G-Shot series has always aimed squarely at the lower end of the market, for those people who want to have as many multimedia functions as possible crammed into one compact, easy to carry machine. To that end the DV5133 doesn't disappoint, as it aims to be a still and video camera, Web-cam, music player and even eBook reader and still look relatively stylish.
The first thing you notice when you take it out of the box is how light it is (scarcely 200g) and how small; around the size of a chunky bar of soap. Styled in chic silver, it's designed for maximum ease of use with most of the controls and inputs down one edge and autofocus for both video and still photo capture.
Power is supplied via two AA alkaline batteries (supplied) which fit snugly in the side panel and the flip side has the 2.4-inch LTPS LCD monitor which pops up to turn the camera on and then rotates up to 270 degrees. There's a built-in 64MB memory which can be supplemented up to 2GB via the SD/MMC Card Slot in the base.
The circular control pad is a standard design and the menus are familiar to navigate around. In video mode you're shooting in MPEG-4 with 640 x 480 (VGA) and 320 x 240 (QVGA) video clips at DVD quality 30fps. The DV5133 boasts a true 5.2-megapixel CMOS image sensor with interpolation up to 11-megapixels, so your still images are clear and sharp.
Still image resolutions range from 3,840 x 2,880 at high (i.e. 11 megapixels), to 2,592 x 1,944 at standard (5 megapixels) and 1,600 x 1,200 at low (2 megapixels), all recorded in JPEG format. The 8x digital zoom is unfortunately very jerky in operation so isn't advised for video usage but you do have three focus range settings for macro, portrait and normal modes. Two snapshots can be combined into one or you can take five continuous pictures in multi-snap mode.
Apart from its photo recording functions, you can also use this camera as a Web-cam (complete with security motion detection), to play back MP3 tracks with lyrics attached, as a speech recorder or to read eBooks. The supplied USB cable allows data to flow back and forth to your PC and the TV-out option means you can watch your videos and stills on the big screen.
Finally, the supplied software includes Arcsoft Media Converter (to convert any kind of video file format into MPEG-4 Xvid compatible), Arcsoft Showbiz DVD for burning copies of your movies and Arcsoft Photo Impression to help edit and organise your still photos.
