One side of the PDR-M81 has a locking memory card compartment for its spring-loaded SmartMedia card; you remove it by pressing it in a bit further and it smoothly pops out. The opposite side features a playback speaker for movies, and two terminals­ one for an optional external power pack and the other, a Video Out/USB combination. Finally, the camera also has a small microphone on the front and a locking in-line, 4-AA battery compartment along the bottom with an easy-to-read polarity diagram.

At first I thought the ring around the base of the lens would unscrew to allow an adapter to be attached for auxiliary lenses and filters. But no, it's "welded" to the camera body so that's not an option. Nor can you attach anything to the lens mount itself since it would jam when retracting. It's an unfortunate omission because you won't be able to use wide-angle, telephoto, or super-macro add-ons which would extend this digicam's versatility considerably.

On the up side, image quality was fine and I printed nice 8 x 10 inch blow-ups from about half the full picture size—which is what I would expect from a 4MP camera. That means 11 x 14 inch (and even larger) images should be no problem, provided you have a printer that can output on that size paper. On a more practical level it means you can now crop (trim) pieces out of your images with the assurance they'll enlarge well without pixelating.

Like many digicams, the PDR-M81 has a bracketing feature that shoots the same picture at different exposures—one of them should be "right on." But there's also another way to determine if your images will be correctly exposed before you shoot.

When set to Manual, the LCD monitor displays a small, real-time histogram that shows light and dark values in the scene as an animated bar graph. If most of the bars are bunched to one end or the other, your image will likely turn out too dark or too light; simply adjust your exposure settings until the bars are more evenly distributed. You'll quickly get the hang of it and appreciate the perfect prints that'll result.

The PDR-M81 is an easy digicam to use with a good feature set. Its ultimate picture quality is still to be determined but I'm betting it will be more than acceptable judging from my preliminary results. So if the price is within your budget and you want a good, solid, ultra-high resolution digicam companion for both at home and on the road, the PDR-M81 should do just fine.

For specifications and another look at the PDR-M81, click on over to to Steve's Digicams.

This review has been used by permission of DIGITAL CAMERA MAGAZINE.

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