So, you want a digital camera and an MP3 player, but you’d rather not carry two bits of kit around with you. There are several options that offer “all in one” solutions to this dilemma. One route is to carry a phone with a camera and music player, while another is to look at devices like the G-Shot DV 610 which offer these things and a range of other extras on top.
The G-Shot DV 610, in fact, claims to offer six features; digital stills and video camera, MP3 player, Web-cam, digital voice recorder and the ability to be used as a mass storage device. All in a neat package measuring 100 x 70 x 30mm in your choice of shiny metallic blue or red finish. Aside from the device itself, you get a range of extras; a belt-clip-style carrying case, a lanyard for wearing the thing around your neck, a tripod for when using the G-Shot DV 610 as a Web-cam, a stereo headset, a USB cable for PC connections and AV cables for sending movies to a TV - topped off by a mains power cable for charging the Lithium-Ion battery. There is 16MB of built-in memory (only 4MB of this is available for storage) but the SD card slot that supports cards of up to 512MB compensates for the small inbuilt memory (if you have a card in the slot, everything you save is automatically sent there). The G-Shot DV 610 has a handy flip-out, 2-inch LCD screen that you use for framing video and stills. The screen swivels nicely to give a wide range of viewing angles and ways of holding the hardware. Where digital video and stills were concerned, taking shots and videos was a breeze with switches and buttons on the camera for macro, landscape and portrait stills and for using the up-to-8x digital zoom. There’s also a funny ‘two in one’ shooting mode that lets you take two snaps for opposite halves of a single image. It’s rather fun.
Images can be shot at resolutions of 2976 x 2232, 2048 x 1536 and 1024 x 768 pixels, the higher resolution achieved by software interpolation. Video is captured as MPEG4 format at 640 x 480 and 320 x 240 pixels, both at 30 frames per second. Overall a great little device for a very reasonable price.