The Japanese-built Che-ez! v:u digital movie 'imager' is a stab at imitating Panasonic's revolutionary SV-AV-10, which put a digital still and movie camera, audio recorder and MP3 player into one small package.
Much like the Panasonic machine, the Che-ez image falls short in quality for dedicated still or movie cameras. But the redeeming factor is that, while movies are limited to a maximum resolution of 448x336 pixels, the still camera is capable of 2.1 megapixels.
This means that, while the video image from the v:u is rather pixilated, the 1600x1200 photos the camera produces are worthy of being made into prints (albeit small ones).
A built-in flash would have been a welcome addition.
The unit comes with cables for watching recorded movies on television, although the resulting picture is rather dark and the sound is not crisp enough to follow conversations.
Both the sound quality and the picture quality are dramatically better when the movie clips, which are recorded as .avi files, are downloaded onto a PC by being manually copied from the Secure Digital card.
View-finding when recording movies or taking pictures is done through a fold-out 3.8cm LCD display, the size of which is adequate for its purposes. The unit has a 2x digital zoom, but that is best avoided while shooting movie clips, as with all digital zooms.