DC DXG-502 5MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom Review

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(More customer reviews)Bought a DXG-502 for $99 from Shopko on 11/25/05 as part of their loss leader Black Friday specials. It included the camera, bag, lens cover, driver, NIMH rechargable batteries and charger.
After thoroughly reading the manual, I inserted two new high quality alkaline batteries while NIMH batteries were charging for the 190 minutes. The charger has a green-charged and red-charging light that is handy. The camera shut down due to low battery after two pictures (don't think the flash even was used). Hum! The alkaline batteries were new and checked with a Fluke meter. The manual does say that alkaline batteries may not be adequate and to use industrial alkaline batteries. Ok, so I waited the 190 minutes and inserted the NIMH only to have the camera give a low battery status after less than five minutes of configuration and no pictures. I'm thinking to myself, "Is this camera a battery hog or are both sets of 'new' batteries the problem?" Oh yeah, all configuration settings changes are kept during battery removals except for the date and time - kind of annoying.
Update: Recharged the batteries for fifth time or so and the camera worked for ~40 flash pictures. The camera has a ~10 second time delay between pictures when taken with a flash and ~ 5sec without.
Several times, the camera locked-up and wouldn't even turn off. After power cycling with the battery cover and a ~60 second delay the camera would turn back on and then allow me to resume taking pictures. Sometime during all this power cycling, the autofocus (no manual focus) stopped working with all pictures blurry (the front lens is clean and the rear LCD is fine). The camera was not dropped and the default configuration settings were restored with no help in fixing the autofocus. The battery display still shows fully charged.
The pictures were able to be uploaded to my pc and some looked real good while others were blurry but this is most likely due to the monkey on the button rather than the camera.
Bottom line, the DXG-502 has great specifications but appears to have some firmware and/or power issues. This is really too bad as I really wanted to keep this camera. Suggest looking elsewhere as this unit is going back.

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DXG-502

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