At first I thought the ring around the base of the lens would unscrew, Canon-style, to allow an adapter to be screwed in. 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, especially since the PDR-M81 can take marvelous infrared pictures which are easily previewed on the LCD monitor when you hold a Tiffen 87 IR filter in front of its lens. So it seems that you won't be able to use wide-angle, telephoto, or super-macro add-ons which would extend this digicam's versatility considerably. But wait! Now it appears that Tiffen will come up with an auxiliary lens mount as they have for other Toshiba models. So all is not lost.

The PDR-M81's image quality is fine and I repeated the tests I did on the pre-production model, printing 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 that you can now crop pieces out of your images with the assurance they'll enlarge well without pixelating– something 35mm film users have always said would take forever for digital to achieve.

Shot with the 4MP PDR-M81, this picture illustrates several things. First, though you may not be able to see it in this web image, the light metering has held detail in the transformer cylinder at the top of the pole even when shooting against a bright sky. Secondly, there are enough pixels to make a nice vertical composition from half the image and still get a good-sized blow-up. Finally, a great resolution test is to shoot twisted and straight power and phone lines strung at different angles. Again, though they may not appear as such here, they stayed smooth and didn't become jagged on the test prints.

The PDR-M81 has some very useful and unique features. You can use its internal buffer memory as temporary storage if you want to copy images from one card to another. Just insert a card, choose your images and they'll be held in the buffer. Then insert a new card and copy them to it. There's also 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. In Playback, toggling the Display/Info button brings up a larger histogram that overlays the image for a more detailed analysis. Toggle again, and complete information about resolution, compression, shutter speed, aperture, exposure compensation, ISO equivalent, flash, and file size appear.

Speaking of which, your camera file sizes at 4MP are going to be large­ between 1.2MB to 1.4MB, especially if you shoot at highest resolution and least (best) compression. And they'll inflate to a blimpy 11MB when opened. So don't be surprised if operations that used whiz right along in your imaging program slow down a bit. On the bright side, it does give you a reason to get a faster computer, some more RAM or both. It never ends, does it?

Well, we've come to the moment of truth, and when all's said and done, the PDR-M81 is an easy digicam to use with a good feature set and its picture quality is fine. 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 be just the ticket.

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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