Hi guys welcome back to the channel. In today's video I'm going to be reviewing
a new camera to the UK market. Now I have been sent this camera by the manufacturer.
They've sent me the camera for free, I can keep it, it is just for the purpose of producing
the video. I'm under no obligation to say this camera is fantastic, to recommend it,
whatever, all they want is an unbiased review which was something that I was
pretty insistent on. So without further ado, let's get into the video and we'll review this camera.
Recently Altruewit reached out to me, now they're a Chinese brand and they've just released a new
camera onto the UK market. They said would I like to review their latest product which is this,
the dc800 and I said sure, send one over to me, and I did insist that any review
I did of it would be completely honest, that was one of the stipulations I made.
They were quite fine with that, so here it is, and we're going to have a look
at the camera. But first we're going to talk a little bit about it, then we're going to unbox
it then we'll take it out and shoot some images with it, and yeah we'll see see what it's like.
So the Altruewit dc800 has been available in the USA for quite some time,
normally it's been sold through Amazon USA, and now it's going to be available here in the UK,
again through Amazon. Looking at the dc800, it does remind me somewhat of the Aberg Best
camera I reviewed around about 18 months ago, certainly is very similar in size and
price point. One thing that is very much unusual about the Altruewit
camera is that the fact it has dual shutter buttons. Now this is claimed to be handier for
left-handed people. I'm a left-handed person and I must admit it's not really something I've ever
considered. I have no problem pressing the shutter button with my right hand,
but I can see that this would be actually quite handy for right-handed people taking selfies!
But enough of that let's get this camera unboxed and we'll see what we've got.
So this is the front of the box as you can see it's quite nicely designed we've got this
nice gloss finish over the image of the camera, looks quite nice,
as a graphic designer I appreciate that. A few of the icons here, double shutter button,
macro well yes, and you have 48 megapixels max. Now that seems a little bit optimistic
on a compact camera like this, but we shall see there's an auto focus,
a digital zoom which is time 16x. I'm not a fan of digital zooms but there you go,
and a 2.7 of an inch LCD display on the back of the camera as well. Time to unbox it!
Okay folks let's get this unboxed.
The first thing this note was definitely being sent a black one it's been indicated there,
as I said there are a choice of white blue pink and of course black. So we'll get that opened.
A nice reminder there that there isn't a memory card included.
The first thing, we've got a user guide. One battery there.
There is the second battery - that's handy. There's a charging cable.
And a wall charger.
We've got a wrist strap there, very very similar to the one you get with the Aberg Best camera.
And again...
...there's our camera
it's well packaged...
...there we go, camera, black as it says on the side of the box...
..and you also get a little pouch to keep the camera safe.
So that's the contents of the box, we've just got to go and try the camera now.
So looking at the camera, it's not a bad looking little camera at all.
Typical compact camera type setup, entirely plastic shell on this model. The Aberg Best,
I think, had a plastic chassis with metal front and back. This one's entirely plastic,
it's nicely curved, pretty nice design. You've got these black thumb grips front and back which
are more prominent on the coloured versions of the camera. They sent me out a black one so
this is the camera I'm reviewing but they also come in white, a bright pink,
and a quite attractive metallic blue version. At the back of the camera you've got a 2.7 inch
TFT screen there, you've also got your keypad there with different settings on for things like
your flash, your mode dial, timer and also to set up these this left-handed shutter button,
and um there's also your video mode. At the bottom you've also got your rocker switch there to go to
wide or close-up images (telephoto). On the side you have the switch very similar to the Aberg Best
which is to switch it up for macro and down for landscape modes. On the top again silver buttons
you've got your two shutter buttons there and the power switch to switch it on. At the front of the
camera we've got a lens, it is a fixed lens. Now it does appear to have a plastic front element,
certainly um Carl Zeiss it's not, but for the type of customer who will be buying this camera
it's a simple point-and-shoot to take out with you, anywhere you go, take this little
camera fits in your pocket nicely and you'll use this to record family events, days out
or perhaps you're going to give this type of camera to a child. Or perhaps you're going
to buy it because you're going to go in on a trip and you don't want to risk your iPhone
or you know, expensive google pixel camera phone and you just want to take something to record the
day and you don't really want to risk any decent gear. Coming back to the lens is a fixed lens we
do have a digital zoom and if you're used to this channel you know I'm not really a fan of digital
zooms. All it's going to do is going to crop in on your photograph and reduce the image quality,
which is a bit of a shame. As well as that on the front we've got the fill light which looks
like an LED rather than a flash, and a little tiny, weeny mirror for doing your selfies.
At the base of the camera we do have a brass tripod mount so that shouldn't present any
problems, often cameras like this have a plastic mount and they've stripped the threads within
hours. You've also got your compartment there which is for your SD card and
let me just try and get that one out, now there we go we've got an SD card there in it
already ready to go. And your battery goes in there, you have to put the battery in at a slight
angle to get it in there but it does fit.
So that's a little run down of the camera, all it leaves now is to get out and take some photographs
with it and we shall see what the results are like. If it's not favourable then I'm gonna let
you know about it, if it's good then certainly I'll be singing it's praises. But that's it for
now, we'll get out now get some photographs done and we'll have a look at them later on.
Well we've come out to test this little Altruewit digital camera. It's currently midday, as the
saying goes mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the middle sun, but that is possibly the type of
time of the day that most people will be shooting with this type of camera. I don't suppose it's
going to appeal to a lot of serious photographers to be going out at sunset and sunrise!
So one immediate elephant in the room with this camera is of course the claimed 48 megapixel files
that it produces. Now I have taken a couple of test shots
and have looked at those and they do come out at 8000 by 6000 pixels so by my reckoning
that is 48 megapixels! Now I do suspect that a lot of interpolation is going on inside this camera.
Another thing I've noticed with this camera as well that screen on the back is pretty low quality
and you do find that a lot of the highlights are blown out in the screen. I'm just hoping
that that's not the same case for the images I'm taking today.
So a few thoughts so far. That screen on the back of this camera
really is one of the detractors from the camera itself. It really is hard to see if you've
taken a good shot or not especially in bright daylight. Unfortunately I think it's going to
be overblowing the highlights, and because you can only shoot in jpeg format in this camera,
that is certainly going to be an issue as far as image quality is going to be concerned.
We're going to have lost all that information and there won't be anywhere to retrieve it. I maybe
wrong once we get them back onto the computer, we may be able to see a difference between what
you can see on the back of the screen and what the camera is actually recorded, only time will tell.
My other pet head of course is that digital zoom. I really can't see that
the images are going to be any good using that, and this camera really needs a zoom
to get much closer to the subjects it's shooting.
So we're back from our little trip out to do some photography, I
took some videos as well so we're going to have a look now at those images and the video clips
and see what we think, and we'll talk through the images and I'll let you know what I think of them.
For these shots I used the landscape setting on the camera plus the landscape mode within the
cameras menu. I'm reasonably happy with how this little camera has rendered the colours,
and the image quality looks pretty good when you reduce the images. One thing to note,
this last image, that this screen again caused me issues.
This image of the train sculpture appeared to be in silhouette on the back of the camera,
luckily the camera did find some detail where the screen did not!
Once more I was quite surprised with the performance of the camera on the whole.
I don't think this little plastic lens will worry keen macro photographers,
but it did do a good job for this type of camera. However,
it did seem to have some issues with really bright subjects often burning out the highlights.
When photographing some of the birds on the lake I put the camera into sports
mode to increase the shutter speed to freeze any movement. One thing to note
don't expect DSLR like reflexes from the shutter, it does suffer some lag
between pressing the shutter button and the camera actually taking a photograph.
Now we come to the Achilles heel of this camera, the digital zoom!
Digital zooms are awful and the zoom on this camera is no exception. Soft, mushy,
overblown highlights abound, even the last shot taken in macro mode with a small amount of digital
zoom would have been much better had the camera been equipped with an optical zoom.
Now onto the video footage. You saw some earlier in this little review, and yeah it's pretty much
okay. 1080p 30 frames per second isn't going to set the world of light but to record your
short holiday videos, family occasions or just to record your next tiktok hit it'll do just fine!
So the question we all want to know is can you use the Altruewit camera
for vlogging? Well I've just got this set up here on my tripod, I've got two ring lights on the side
and I'm currently recording using the standard mics on the camera.
So you can see what you think about the quality of this video.
so what's the day after the little trip out with the Altruewit. I've
had all the images on the computer, had a good look at them and the video clips it took,
and here are my thoughts on the little Altruewit digital camera.
For what it is, a budget point-and-shoot camera, it did okay. Whilst they advertise
that this camera is capable of 48 megapixels it's nothing of the sort really. Yes the file
sizes do come out at 48 megapixels, however, at the heart of this camera
is an 8 megapixel sensor and the camera simply interpolates those images up to 48 megapixels.
Now before you switch off, please remember that the Aberg Best camera I tested last year
that did the same thing - at the heart of that camera we had a 5 megapixel sensor
and it took it up to 21 megapixels. In fact, out of the budget cameras have tested only the
Praktica z212 was actually a 21 megapixel sensor.
Despite it only being eight megapixels and interpolating to 48 megapixels, really how many
of us actually do print our images these days. Now most of us will use this camera for the likes of
social media or perhaps you'll be doing small prints, 6"x4" or 7"x5" of your holiday snaps.
To prove it's an alright little camera, here is one I actually did on my current
Canon selfie here at home, and hopefully you can see that. I'll zoom in, that's pretty decent
quality from such a little camera. Video wise, the camera outputs 1080p footage and that is
more than either the Praktica or the Aberg Best camera can manage. Both of those cameras only
produce 720p. There is also a claim on the back of the box which says this camera does shoot in 4k.
However, it only offers 4k at 10 frames a second so it's not really worth considering.
One thing I really did miss on this camera was an optical zoom.
Now the digital zoom was absolutely rubbish and if you really need an optical zoom then
you're gonna have to look elsewhere, this camera can't offer you that.
To sum up then. If you are really determined to buy a digital camera and you don't want to spend
a lot of money then the Altruewit digital camera is worth a look. However there are better cameras
out there and there are also a lot worse cameras out there! So i'll leave that choice up to you.
So that just leaves me to say the usual things, which are, if you've enjoyed this video please
give it a thumbs up, if you're not a subscriber why not subscribe, and if you'd like to thank me
for this review, then leave a donation using the super thanks button at the bottom of
this screen. Thank you very much for watching see you again next time bye for now.