It's not often we review a digital camera that is truly novel, but behold the Pentax Digibino DB100 - a pair of binoculars that doubles as a digital camera.

Initial impressions are a bit mixed. You can't swivel the casing to make the eyepieces sit comfortably on the eye, although the eyepiece spacing can be adjusted by sliding the case horizontally. E

verything is delivered at 7x magnification, comparable to what you'd find on a standard pair of binoculars.

As a digital camera, the Digibino DB 100 is very impressive, thanks to that zoom - there are no other digital cameras available at this price with a 7x zoom.

But there is a limitation in that the zoom is fixed and cannot be altered - just like a pair of binoculars, in fact.

There is no removable memory slot but there is 16MB of internal memory.

The camera supports three image types. You can store around 100 images of 1024 x 768 using the best option for printed photographs. Reduce the quality at the same resolution and you can squeeze in 150 images. If you want photos for a website or to email, then opt for 640 x 480, at which you can store 300 images.

The on-board screen and buttons for viewing, erasing, setting image quality and so on are fairly standard. There is a continuous shooting mode which grabs five images a second, but nothing else by way of fancy features.

Connect to your desktop PC via USB and you get an image-viewing application called ACDSee.

The Digibino DB100 is very clever indeed - although, zooming aside, it's not quite yet the best of both digital camera and binocular worlds.

DETAILS
Price: £300
Contact: Pentax 01753 792731
www.pentax.co.uk