GE Create by Jason Wu review

After dressing First Lady Michelle Obama for her cover shoot in Vogue magazine and then at the Presidential Inauguration balls in November 2008, Jason Wu became one of the hottest names in fashion. It helped him to win Fashion Group International’s Rising Star award for 2008.

GE has played on Jason Wu’s star status and hopes that the camera will attract fans of his clothing designs and those who want a luxurious camera. Wu designed the camera’s visual appearance and includes his trademark grey leather finish. There’s even a matching grey leather wrist strap and case included with the camera, also designed by him.

There’s no battery or memory card compartment; instead, there’s a fully retractable USB connector which, combined with the built-in software, allows you to charge the camera and transfer photos from its 4GB of built-in memory to your computer. This is undoubtedly an interesting decision to make, but we think it’s the right one for such a camera.

We showed the Create Leather to a number of friends familiar with Wu’s work. They used the camera for a while and said that it captures the elegance of his work with different textures, such as the luxury leather finish on the front panel, and the simplicity of its controls.

There are a select few options for the user to change, which include enabling or disabling the flash and setting a self-timer, with everything else handled automatically by the camera. There’s a menu available too, but this is only available when you switch the camera on.

The options are very limited, with no option to select the ISO setting for example, and it’s annoying that you can’t access the menu without switching the camera on and off. As a casual camera, this is fine, but for those wanting something a little more advanced you’ll be left wanting a bit more.

Thankfully, the camera handles exposure pretty well and most of our images were well exposed. It only struggled when we presented it with a difficult lighting situation – particularly with strong back lighting (where the subject is in front of the light source) – where it tended to under-expose the subject. Create’s way of getting around this is to fire the flash because there’s no exposure compensation, but you’ll have to enable that manually if it’s still quite bright.

Create’s auto-focusing wasn’t quite so good though and we felt it limited our creativity somewhat. There’s only one AF zone, which is in the centre, and there’s no opportunity to depress the shutter halfway to focus and then recompose – it will re-focus when you release the shutter so you’ll quite often end up with out of focus images. It would really benefit from employing a multi-zone focusing system and this wouldn’t necessarily compromise the simplistic interface.

We were quite pleasantly surprised by the Create’s image quality. It has a 12.2-megapixel sensor and a 3x optical zoom lens (35-105mm f/3.1-f/5.7) to produce vibrant and relatively sharp images. The lens manages chromatic aberrations quite well, but without a macro mode you’ll struggle to take good close-up photos.

The 2.7in screen really doesn’t do the Create’s photographs justice, though, and is the camera’s weakest point. Its 230,000 dot resolution is very low by today’s standards; the splash screen shown when you turn the camera on doesn’t look particularly sharp and neither do the photos you’ll take, but they do when you transfer them onto your computer. The screen is also difficult to view in bright sunlight and has poor viewing angles – it’s a big disappointment.

Its built-in video mode is also slightly disappointing compared to other compact cameras, as it’s limited to 640×480 at 30fps with mono audio. The soundtrack isn’t great with a lot of background noise present, even in a quiet room, and you can’t zoom while recording.

Ultimately the Create has some good and bad points, but it’s quite finely balanced. The Create’s design will definitely appeal to fans of Jason Wu’s work and its image quality is also very good for a compact camera. However, the camera’s limitations – in particular the lack of a multi-zone auto focus system – can be quite frustrating at times. If you’re looking for a similarly priced luxury camera with more features and controls, the Canon Ixus 130 isn’t a bad choice, but the Create will take better pictures if all you need is an automatic mode.