Trust's 950 Powerc@m Zoom is slightly smaller than many other 3-megapixel cameras, with dimensions of 93 x 56 x 39mm and a weight of 135g, and the rest of its specification is conventional too.
It has 16MB of internal memory, and under a cover on the right there are two AA batteries and an SD card slot. If you have any familiarity with digital cameras it would only take a minute or two to become entirely familiar with the rotary control, five-way joystick and two control buttons.
As you would expect from a budget camera, the body is plastic rather than metal, while the only obvious sign of cost-cutting is the fixed optical zoom, although you do get 4x digital zoom, so the 950 Powerc@m Zoom has the equivalent of a 37mm lens.
Trust has taken the trouble to include four pieces of Arcsoft software (PhotoBase 3, PhotoImpression 3, VideoImpression and FunHouse) and it also has had the neat idea of offering its customers a password-protected Web page to host your photos, so you can avoid e-mailing pictures to your friends over a limp 56Kbps connection. It has even included a very small tripod in the box.
So far, so good, but there's a nasty sting in the tail, which is that this camera takes very poor photos. For starters the flash is incredibly bright and washes out any picture when you use it, but on the other hand pictures taken without the flash look far too dark, even if the ambient lighting is good, so portraits taken indoors are either too dark or the subjects look terribly sallow and unhealthy.
A still life should be an easy test that dwells on colour reproduction, but even a simple flower arrangement appears to be beyond this camera. If you can sort out the lighting levels - and an exterior shot in sunlight is your best bet here - then you will manage to take a reasonable photo, but it is unlikely to look much good.
Despite a resolution of 2,048 x 1,536 the pictures are grainy, and you can forget about using the digital zoom as it throws away what little picture information the camera has captured. For that matter you can also forget about the macro control as it is incapable of taking a sharp, clear close-up picture.
