Agfa EPhoto CL30 Clik

Digital cameras have two main problems. First, the pictures just aren't as good as you'd get from even the cheapest traditional camera, and second, you need special memory cards which insert into the camera and onto which you store your pictures. These are expensive, and few cameras include enough memory.

The answer to one of these problems has arrived. Agfa's shiny new version of the existing CL30 digital camera uses a built-in Iomega Clik drive rather than a memory card slot, so you can store all your pictures on a tiny little disk that holds 40Mb of data.

Agfa claims you can take up to 60 snaps at the very best picture quality setting, although we managed to squeeze 70 on there. Or you could take up to 360 poorer quality images at resolutions that are more than adequate for emailing purposes or for putting up on a website.

That's pretty good in itself, but the best bit is that the Clik 40Mb disks only cost about £8 each if you buy a multi-pack. By comparison, you'll get 32Mb of Smartmedia for £75 or Compactflash for £66. And the camera costs just £50 more than the standard CL30. Given that a standalone Clik drive will set you back about £150, that's not a bad deal. The Iomega software also allows you to use the camera as an extra disk drive and store other information on the disks, too.

On the downside, picture taking is slow and battery life isn't great. Admittedly, we deliberately tried to run them down by taking all our pics with flash and using the colour viewfinder (both battery eaters). We got 60 snaps out of a fresh set of alkaline batteries - not quite as good as we'd expect to get with most other digital cameras.

There's no zoom lens: the so-called 'digital zoom' just chops down to the centre of the picture. Although the picture quality is okay, Agfa claims a top resolution of 1440 x 1080 pixels at the PhotoGenie setting. But we saw no real difference between the snaps taken at this setting and the next one down, 1152 x 864.

Also, at that setting you can fit 120 pictures on one disk. This is an adequate resolution for printouts up to normal photo size, but your pictures will look grainy if you want them any bigger. What's more, all these pictures are ompressed JPEGs. With 40Mb of storage available on each disk, surely Agfa could ave offered an uncompressed option.

Colours are pretty faithful in outside snaps - less so indoors - and the sharpness of the pictures is acceptable, but downloading them to a computer can be a bit tricky. Easiest and quickest, as long as you have a USB-ready PC, is just to use the camera as an extra disk drive and copy all your snaps into a folder on your hard disk.

You could use Agfa's PhotoWise software, which allows you to create photo albums to organise your pictures as well as letting you view thumbnails of the pics on the camera. But it's a much longer process and it caused us a number of problems on our computer. Its only advantage is that the PhotoWise package performs Agfa's PhotoGenie magic on high-resolution photos, but as we say above, we don't rate this much.

The CL30 offers USB and serial interfaces to download pictures, but we found the serial interface took far too long to download 40Mb this way - about half an hour. Also, when we left the Clik disk in the camera for too long while downloading, it overheated and threw up annoying read errors.