If you've been thinking about a digital camera primarily to get pictures onto the web, you should take a look at the Intel Pocket PC Camera introduced a few months ago. This is not a fancy enthusiast camera with high resolution and interchangeable lenses. In fact, at first glance, it looks like something out of a Cracker Jack box. It does do two basic things very well, though:

1. It will sit on top of your monitor and act as a video-phone for talking to others on line with similar equipment.

2. Unplug and go with you (in your pocket) as a point-and-shoot camera.

It makes very nice pictures that can be uploaded, or can be printed on your color printer at the PC. The capacity is over 100 shots in the low resolution mode that makes 72 dpi pictures. This is the mode I used for the chip show pictures I posted yesterday. I've tried blowing these up and they look great at 4 x 5, but don't look too good at 5 x 7 and larger. They compress to very small files... the ones I posted came out of the camera as 50 KB JPEG files, and compress another 20% or so if you want. The ones I posted are compressed at JPG quality 1.

When carried as a portable camera, it is fixed focus. Since it looks at each image as you shoot it, it is auto exposure. It has no flash, and with a little care used in picking your lighting doesn't need one.

When connected to your PC, you have a viewer (your PC monitor) and can use the focusing ring on the lens to get very close to an object. You can fill the frame with a chip if you like, although I'd plan to use a scanner to capture most chips myself. The multi-element lens is adequate for the resolution of the pictures. You need a USB port to connect to and most PC's made in the last couple of years will have one.

Some other features:

A speaker to let you hear the synthesized "shutter click" when you push the button. You can turn this off if you want.

A self timer so you can get in the picture yourself.

A high quality mode which makes the picture 640 x 480 pixels, rather than the 320 x 240 in the normal mode. You get to store fewer pics in this mode, of course.

A video clip mode, which allows you to capture up to 10 second videos, as if you had a camcorder. These videos are not high quality, but they are movies.

A multi-snap mode which takes 5 shots in rapid succession. Let's you choose the best one if your subject is moving or changing expression.

There is extensive software provided to download the pictures from the camera, to run the video-phone mode, to create gallaries of your snapshots, to edit the pictures, etc.

Best of all is the price. I paid less than $150 at a warehouse store. It uses standard AAA batteries, not an expensive custom battery.

I think INTEL has a winner, and is the one for the competition to beat for an inexpensive easy to use web camera.

DonL