Although the PDR-M70 is very oversized by today's standards, I found that it was a very straight forward camera that gave much flexibility in terms of what the camera can do. One thing that I found extremely annoying was the placement of the flash on the camera. It seems 1 out of every 3 shots that I take are too dark because my finger was either over the flash, or the light sensor on the front.

The camera seems to pretty sturdy, from a distance it looks made of steel, but it is really just a hard plastic. A hard plastic that held up in a couple of my most graceful moments. The back of the camera contains a 1.8” LCD that for the most part works well, unless you are in a place that has a lot of sunlight. Again Toshiba did not place this screen in the best of spots, whenever I was using the large optical view finder, I noticed some nose smudges on the LCD (nothing a light cloth did not fix)

The back of the camera features a 4-way switch used in navigating the menus, change modes, macro mode / photo info and delete. The well placed zoom button (3x optical and 2x digital) is located to the upper right.

The top of the camera contains a small LCD that displays: How many pictures left, image quality (noted by *), size of the image, and battery life. There is also a selection wheel that is used to select which mode the camera is in. Here is a list of the different modes the camera can be put into:

• Setup
• PC connect
• Play
• Auto record (point-and-shoot)
• Shutter priority mode (Tv)
• Aperture priority mode (Av)
• Movie mode
• Voice recorder

Right above that wheel is where the shutter button is located, I had no trouble finding this button while looking through the optical view finder. Also the speaker for recording voice is located on the bottom of the camera.