The Aiptek Pencam SD 1.3 was my next camera after the loss of the Mini Pencam. Pricing for both pencams at the time was about equal, though it seems that now the newer Pencam SD has actually gotten cheaper than the Mini Pencam by about $20.

The addition of a Secure Digital card slot was a big advantage, allowing me to expand storage to over a hundred photos on a 128MB SD card. In designing the Pencam SD, it seems Aiptek considered many of the design drawbacks of the Mini Pencam and attempted to rectify them: the camera is horizontally oriented, with a curvier, more streamlined body, much easier to hold in the hand. The trigger is far enough from the lens that there is no risk of fingers intruding on the lens. The buttons are still easy to accidentally press in the pocket, though, possibly easier than with the Mini Pencam, which can drain batteries and give you an occasional solid black photo — but not completely solid black. More on that in a bit.

As with the Mini Pencam, image quality from the Pencam SD was good in outdoor conditions with bright daylight, and reasonable indoors as long as it wasn’t too dim. Below a certain threshold of dimness, besides the usual scan lines and JPEG artifacts, a gradiated vertical strip of lighter green would show up in my photos, sometimes noticeable even in brighter shots. It was probably a CCD issue, and I’m not certain if it was a flaw specific to this unit or to the entire Pencam SD line. If the latter, that might explain the price difference.

To conclude, if you don’t need a lot of storage, go for the Mini Pencam. But if you need to expand, well, get the Pencam SD and make sure to take your photos in bright light. It’s the price you pay for a cheap and tiny camera, but hey, $30-$40 is pretty good for a pocket-size snapshot-taker!

(Sample photo and more after the jump.)

Here’s a sample photo from the Pencam SD, of the Power Plant at Baltimore Inner Harbor. It was a dim, cloudy day in winter, so if you look carefully, you can see where that CCD issue is causing greenish lightening towards the top middle of the image (that was actually the middle of the photo before cropping):

(Again, my descriptions of the Pencam SD are in the past tense because the camera is no longer with me: it went to my youngest brother as a sentimental Christmas gift in 2004. He says he gets a lot of use out of it for school.)

Interested? Buy the Pencam SD 1.3 on Aiptek!