Simple to use, with elementary controls. The menu system has two pages with five options in total. You have eight buttons if you don't count the shutter/on-off.

This competed most directly with the Sony FD-91, and was in every way except the zoom a better camera. It even has better quality images than some "high end" models like the Kodak DCS 315, but never kid yourself you have a sleeper bargain.

About the same size as contemporary "bridge" cameras. Actually a fairly nice style/design that could pass for a newer camera.

Has a port in it for a photo printer, if you're anti-technology enough to do without a computer altogether.

Lasts a reasonable time with 4 NIMH batteries. Uses SmartMedia flash memory, but unless it has the optional upgrade it's limited to 8MB cards. With the upgrade you can use 16MB or 32MB cards.

The picture quality most surprised me. Noise is present in dim lighting and the dynamic range is poor, but the white balance is usually correct and pictures are actually decent. Outdoor/landscape shots suffer the worst as you focus on small details and see the low resolution and jpeg artifacts, while indoor/flash shots look the best.

Well, it's ancient and has a blazing .85 megapixel resolution, or 1024X768 in other words.

An 8mb SmartMedia card can hold all of 13 images at the "Super High Quality" setting, or 84 on standard.

There is no memory buffer, so you take a shot and wait for it to write to the card, usually 8-10 seconds.

Very noisy zoom, but it may be the age and wear on my example.

Sluggish and sometimes erratic autofocus, which for the time was probably good but today is blah.

The only manual controls are exposure compensation, macro, flash, and a simple spot/matrix metering. I think the later models included white balance. No aperture, shutter, or other standard controls.

The D-500L fit an odd category in the nascent days of digital cameras about late 1997. It was a fairly expensive camera ($900) that used a genuine SLR system but was otherwise a point-n-shoot. It was smaller than contemporary cameras and "modern" in the sense it used flash memory and NIMH batteries, but that was about it. Quality wise it was surprisingly good, but there's no real use to one today other than as a novelty.

Customer Service

At this stage, what would be the point?

Similar Products Used:

Sony FD-91
Kodak DCS 315
Kodak DCS 620x
HP C912

Price. Light weight. Good, clear LCD. True SLR viewing. Uses Smart Media card. Decent battery life if you use a card reader instead of downloading directly from the camera. Decent ergonomics. Accepts filters. Fairly good built-in flash. Easily navigated menu. Has a tripod mount. Optical zoom.

Feels kind of cheap. Rubber plug instead of door over I/O ports. Next to no control over images. Extremely slow downloading. Will not accept larges than 8mb card without sending it in for a rather expensive upgrade. Will not work in low light. Noisy, slow AF. Tripod mount is plastic. Very slow zoom.

My wife bought this for me as a gift. Alas, she doesn''t know much about cameras. But, this isn''t a bad camera at all as long as you''re not planning on printing the images. I''m just a control freak when it comes to photography and this camera is really just a glorified point-n-shoot. It is a very good camera for its age, however. I will often use it to preview composition before using a film camera.

Customer Service

Unknown.

Similar Products Used:

None. This is my first and only digital camera.