My wife recently bought herself a new P&S digicam, a simple little thing (a Kyocera) that a technophobe could easily use. My 2 year old (3yo design) digicam, a Fuji, has the dreaded EVF that is OK in daylight but woeful in dim light, and its autofocus fails dismally in low light. SWMBO doesn't have the personal resources of an old campaigner (myself, that is) to wring a camera's neck and force it to respond.
Stupidly, considering the poor low light performance of the Fuji's AF, it lacks any focus assist beam or manual focus settings. OTOH at only 2MP it delivers better image quality than the 3.2MP Kyocera, due I suspect to a bigger more glass-rich lens that would give better telecentricity (a digital desirable) than the beady little retractable on the Kyocera. But I digress, I should be discussing file recovery. The Kyocera came packaged with Kodak Easyshare, and while using it to rotate some newly downloaded images, it inexplicably corrupted one, and left it unreadable. I'd already deleted the image from the memory card, but fortunately not reformatted the card. I only reformat cards after several uses, not each time. No worries, I had 'Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery' installed. Well, I've never had success with that software and this was no exception. It acknowledges that there are files, and even tells how much memory is involved, but just can't read them. So, Zero Assumption had failed once too often and it had to go. Back to the download sites went I, and found a utility called simply 'Restoration'. It's small (192kb download, 413kb installed) it's freeware, and it works perfectly. I got my lost image back, and in future will only use 'Rota' to rotate JPEGs, and never again Kodak Easyshare. One chance is all that I can afford to give it, and it failed. regards, Anthony Farr
