Sharp VE-CG40U 4MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom

by Sharp

Product Details

Product Manual [7.97mb PDF]

• Product Dimensions: 4 x 4 x 7 inches ; 1.5 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00006FXIK
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #61,109 in Camera & Photo (See Top 100 in Camera & Photo)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 6, 2002

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

The Sharp VE-CG40U 4MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom, featuring Sharp's proprietary CG Silicon Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) technology, is Sharp Electronics Corporation entrance into the digital camera market. Offering ultra-high performance LCD, Sharp's technology uses far less energy than traditional LCD technologies, ensuring that your batteries will last longer, saving energy for when you need it. When used as the viewfinder, the 1.5-inch LCD screen delivers a crisp and true to color preview for proper framing of your photo.

Compact and weighing less than one pound, the Sharp VE-CG40U employs a 4.2-megapixel CCD (charged coupled device) to give you outstanding clarity and richness of detail in your shots. The camera features an all-glass Canon 3x optical zoom with 3x digital zoom, USB interface, white balance control, and image effects. The camera also includes a removable 16 megabyte SD memory card and AC power adapter. With the VE-CG40U, you can also records movie clips (motion JPEG) with sound up to 30 seconds in length.

Sharp has also equipped this camera with such high-end features as program auto-exposure, exposure bracketing, aperture and shutter priority and full manual exposure modes. You can also shoot from five scene modes that will give you the just the right exposure, shutter speed and other controls that your picture demands. The camera gives you added ease-of-use with gamma correction, adjustable ISO sensitivity, white balance options, exposure compensation and "after capture" image effects filters. The VE-CG40U also has an easy "quick link button" that lets you take advantage of one-touch photo transfer from the camera to your computer. Simply connect the included USB cable to the camera and the computer, hit the button, and your photos are on their way to being stored for emailing, re-touching or printing. It's that simple.

What's in the Box
Sharp VE-CG40U digital camera, set of alkaline batteries, AC power adapter, 16 megabyte SD card, USB and audio/video cables, strap, CD-ROM driver disk, USB driver and download software for Windows and instruction manual.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Feature ladened , affortable, but let buyers be aware, December 10, 2002

By 

GT (TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sharp VE-CG40U 4MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom (Electronics)

This is my third digital camera.... Since there is virtually no user review on the web, I intended to find out for myself. I played with it for a week and had to return it ... The bottom line:

Great features and very affordable. Brilliant outdoor pictures. Dull, dark indoor/night pictures with flash (auto mode). Bare-bone software bundle. A battery drain.

Here is my personal experience:

Straight out of the box, I noticed the body of the camera is unlike some square-box cameras. The contour design let you get a good grip and make one-hand operation easy. Just want to be fair; square-box design produces a more compact camera, so this is a trade-off. The CGS LCD monitor is bright and crisp, revealing a lot of details (maybe too much). Since I got it at night, I started shooting around my house in auto mode. The pictures looked nice enough from the LCD. Then it's time to upload the picture.

I loaded up the CD and the installation was typical. The package includes an AC adaptor. Very nice, I thought. Hooked up the AC and USB cable and pressed the one-touch upload button at the back of the camera. Once I played with the software, I was shocked to find out that the software is the least useful of all digital cameras that I had ever seen. There was the USB driver and upload program, and then there was a movie creator. Where is the basic image editing/photo album tool?? I couldn't view the pictures I just uploaded (unless just use IE to view the jpg files)! And I certainly did not want to create a movie with the movie creator.

I ended up using the software came with my old 2 Meg-Pix camera. The images taken around the house were reasonable. But all the pictures I took for kids were very poor: the pictures appeared dark and the skin tone was very dull. That's not what I saw from the LCD! I compared the images on my computer screen to the same pictures on the LCD. The image on LCD looked fine. Maybe it's my monitor, I thought. I also tried the slide show by connecting to my TV. It's wonderful that you can share the pictures on TV with others.

Next day, I took kids to the park and did more shooting. I tried some Scene Mode: Portrait, Snap Shot, Landscape, in addition to the auto mode. The LCD looked bight and crisp even in the day light. That evening, I tried the Night View Scene. I uploaded the picture that night. The pictures all looked reasonable on the computer screen.

Next day, I bought some photo paper and printed out some of the pictures. In the same exact optimal setting (Canon i850 with Canon Photo Paper Pro) that was recommended by the printer vender, the pictures at the park (outdoor, day light) looked absolutely brilliant! But the pictures I took the night before were just like what I saw on the computer screen: dark and dull. I started wondering why the same images looked OK on the LCD screen.

A couple of days later, we went to a Christmas play in the evening. I used to have a SLR camera before. So I switched to Manual mode and took the picture without flash (flash does have the range to reach the stage and it would destroy the colorful light projected onto the stage). It's nice that the camera has good Lens range (F2.0-F2.5) for slow shot like this. I was surprised to see the pictures came out beautifully.

As to the battery usage, I took about 60 pictures, 2/3 with flash. The LCD was on 80% of the time when I took pictures. It ran through two batches of fully charged 4-AA Ni-MH (one batch 1750 mAh, another batch 1875 mAh) rechargeable batteries. This is far shorter than the listed figure on the manual: 200 images on Ni-MH (1600 mAh). Also the fact that some 4 Meg-Pix digital cameras only use two AA batteries makes this one feel like a battery drain.

At this point, I decided to return .... I did not investigate further for other advanced features.

For me, a family photo camera like this, I would like to use the auto mode at night for a lot of occasions. I probably could use some non-auto modes to compensate the images, or use photo software (e.g. Adobe PhotoShop) to touch up my pictures. But that defeats the purpose to have a good camera.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great camera for the price!, December 26, 2002

By 

Ryan Joseph "Bit herder" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sharp VE-CG40U 4MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom (Electronics)

First, lets start with what you notice first, the physical body of the camera. It's fairly well made, although definitely not as solid as the Sony. It's a black plastic case, and the right-hand grip is very well place and makes it much easier to use this camera one-handed than other digital camera I've used. It's much larger than today's "mini" cameras, but the extra bulk makes it easier to handle and in my opinion is a plus, not a minus. However, it's most definitely not a camera you can just slip into a pocket or purse, if that's your thing :).

The camera runs on 4 AA batteries, and this might be the camera's biggest drawback. I've already run through one whole set of batteries and am close to killing the second set. I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I am definitely going to buy some NiMH rechargeable AA batteries - in the long run, it's going to save me a TON of money on batteries, I know that much.

The camera has an adjustable diopter (viewfinder) as well as a 1.8" CG Silicon LCD screen. The "CG Silicon" is supposedly a much sharper, less power-hungry LCD screen perfect for digicams. As for the former, I can definitely attest to that - it may be one of the sharpest looking LCD screen's I've ever seen. I of course can not compare power consumption, but it still seems to suck quite a bit of power out of the poor little AA batteries, but it is still a great screen.

The camera has a total of five buttons on the back, which is a very nice touch. Too many buttons begin to clutter the camera body up, and often times all of the functionality can be done in the menu system of the camera. The top of the camera has the power and shutter buttons, and a mode wheel that lets you select what function you want the camera in (Auto, Full Manual, Video, Playback, and a bunch of others).

You noticed above that I said there is a "Full Manual" mode available - let me tell you that this is one of the best things about this camera. It has a bunch of different automatic modes (i.e.: full automatic, selectable shutter speed and everything else auto, selectable exposure and everything else auto, etc...), but then it gives you a mode that allows you control over everything: exposure (+-2.0ev), shutter speed (16s to 1/1000s), f-stop (from F-2.0 to F-8.0), and focus (kind of). Being an amateur photo geek, I love being able to play with all of these things, and this camera has exactly what I was looking for in that particular area.

Also of particular interest in the special modes you can put the camera into: auto-bracketing, gamma bracketing, continuos exposure. The first does exposure bracketing: i.e., it takes three images, over a range of exposures (for example, it could take images at -1.5ev, 0ev, and 1.5ev) to ensure that you get at least one image that looks good. The second works on the same principal, expect with gamma ranges; and the third takes three images in quick succession, so you can get great action sequences (something that is normally impossible with a digital camera because of the amount of time needed to store the image to the media).

Speaking of media, the Sharp uses standard SD (secure digital) memory cards, some of the smallest cards on the market. I'm somewhat ambivalent on this issue: it was good because SD are some of the smallest and least-expensive (relatively) flash memory on the market, but it's also pretty damn slow, and storing a 4-megapixel image takes some time.

The menu system that the camera uses isn't the best ever designed - it's kinda clunky, takes a bit of getting used to, and has a couple annoying bugs too it. However, there are a ton of things you can do in the menu system, and it works well enough that you can get to whatever feature you want in probably about 5 or 6 steps max - not that great, but not bad either.

All the other important info you can find of the spec sheet if you really want to know: it has a Canon lens, which is nice because without a good lens, the camera is basically worthless; 3X zoom, which is also very nice (3X digital as well, but who uses digital zoom); an AC power slot for when you're transferring images to the computer via USB or when you have a plug handy, which is pretty cool; a video and mono-audio out port and a cable so that the camera can be hooked up to a TV for quick viewing.

The software that comes with it, in my opinion, is great. I read somewhere (the one review I did find on the net about this camera in fact) that someone was complaining because it didn't come with a program to create photo albums or edit the photos or what not. Every time I've ever bought a camera, the software [ ] anyway, and I ended up using PSP or Photoshop or something similar. What does come on the CD is a really cool little program that sits in your taskbar, completely unobtrusive. It waits for you to press the "Quick Sync" button on the camera, and when you do, it automatically transfers the images on the camera to a folder you've specified. I actually think that this particular transfer software may be some of the best I've seen, so this is just another plus to the camera.

All in all, the Sharp VE-CG40U is actually such a good camera that I would even consider buying it at a four- or five-hundred dollar price tag. However, at only three hundred bucks on Outpost, you really can't go wrong. 4-megapixels, total control over the manual aspects of the camera, a great lens and CCD, easy-to-use software; it really is a steal, and if you can get one, I would absolutely recommend it!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 4mp under$300!, January 3, 2003

By 

Dez (Fremont) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sharp VE-CG40U 4MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom (Electronics)

I bought the camera because it had 4mp and was [reasonably priced].The sharpness of 4mp didn't disappoint as the photos were very sharp.I also liked having the option to manually overide most functions which does come in handy in poor lighting.The camera is great outdoors but does struggle at tmes when lighting is poor.Using NiMH batteries you will get pretty good battery life.Regular alkaline batteries is poor;about 1/4 the life of rechargeables.Also get 64mb or 128mb card.(the 64mb will have faster access times)