To power up the camera, I simply pressed the power button for a few seconds and the camera was ready for taking pictures in the default resolution of 640x480. This is a nice resolution, but I prefer to use the highest resolution of 1024x768 that this camera is capable of, especially since it's got 8MB of memory for plenty of image storage. So, a quick few presses of the mode button changes the mode and resolution to what I want-so far, nice and easy. To take pictures, I simply pointed the camera at an area where there's enough light (you'll know if there's enough light in the picture when the green LED beside the viewfinder lights up) and simply press down on the shutter release button to take the picture. Because of its lack of a flash, if there's not enough light in the picture, the camera will just refuse to take the picture.

Unfortunately, here's where things start to get a bit annoying. A feature of the camera is that it automatically shuts down after 1 min of inactivity. At first, this sounded like a nice feature that will save battery power, but it ended up becoming more of an annoyance than anything. After a minute of inactivity, I'd have to press and hold down the power button to turn it back on so I can take pictures again and what's more, everything resets back to its original settings! I had mentioned before that I like to take pictures at 1024x768, but the camera always defaults back to 640x480, so I have to go back and set the mode and resolution every single time I turn the camera back on. It would've been nice if D-Link had included a way to either change the time period that the camera automatically turns off or even have an option of turning off this feature altogether.

Installation
Installation of the DSC-350 into the computer was rather simple, but not as straightforward as I had originally thought. After plugging in the camera to the computer using the included USB cable, Windows automatically detected it and it asked for the driver CD that was included. After installing the driver files, I found that I was able to capture video but I still couldn't use the camera to transfer images. It was not until I put in the driver CD again and ran the installation program to install some TWAIN drivers from the autorun program on the CD that I was able to use the camera to transfer images.

The TWAIN program that was included for the DSC-350 was very easy to use. In a matter of a few seconds, I was able to preview all the images and videos that I had on the camera and transfer of the images took a very short time because of the fast USB connection.

The Digital Camera-Side
After experimenting with some different lighting and different resolutions, I found that this camera is able to put out some pretty decent images, especially when there's a plenty amount of lighting, although sometimes, the pictures tend to turn out to be a little on the blurry side. This could be mainly attributed to the manual focus that is required with this camera and the fact that I'm not a photography expert.

The camera was able to store around 140, 1024x768 images in its 8MB of memory. That's a lot of pictures considering that most 35mm films can only take 24 or 36 pictures for every roll.

Video Capture Woes
D-Link specifications stated that the DSC-350 was capable of capturing video at 640x480 @ 30 frames per second. At first, I was excited to be able to capture at such high resolutions and at such high frame rates, but, unfortunately, the camera was far from able to produce such nice video captures. After running through the included VideoWave and experimenting using a few settings, I found that it could only capture at very low resolutions (such as 320x240) at very low frame rates (I was only able to achieve 5-10 frames per second at such low resolutions). If I set the resolution or frame rate to anything higher, the program will report loads of frames being lost and the video will become very jerky.

I suspect that this is caused by the slow data transfer rate of the USB interface. 12Mbps may be a lot for data transfers such as photographic images, but it quickly becomes a bottleneck for the huge bandwidth that's required by moving images, such as captured video. I'm not doubting that the actual camera is capable of capturing at 640x480 @ 30 frames per second, but when transferring the video to the computer through USB, the speed is lost.

On to: Conclusion