Quite a bargain!

You'd be hard-pressed to find a better camera for the price. My wife picked one of these up the day after Thanksgiving at one of those "black Friday" sales at Target for around $100 and we're more than happy with this little gem. Remember in the 1980s when those "point and shoot" 35 millimeter cameras were all the rage? This reminds me of the digital version of one of those things in that it's easy to use, takes clear pictures and is ideal for taking shots to fill those family photos.

The Kodak EasyShare C633 Digital Camera isn't much when it comes to features. You get a resolution of 6.1 megapixels which is adequate for most folks. The 3x optical zoom works out just fine, but the 5x digital zoom is about worthless for indoor photos (due to the low-power flash). There's a nice, 2.5-inch LCD screen on the back of the unit that renders the tiny optical viewfinder on the camera downright worthless as it gives you a great view of what your shooting and allows you to compose a shot with ease. The viewfinder, too, gives you a good look at how your photos turned out and is large enough to let you see if they are blurry or not. There are some handy photo-cropping tools built into the camera, as well, and the menu system allows you to view photos, delete rotten pictures and the like with ease.

You can capture some grainy video on this, but what's the point? There's a useless feature if I ever saw one, but I wouldn't expect great video quality out of a low-priced camera, anyway.

See? There's not a whole lot to this camera, but I suspect that's the point. It takes very good photos and is simple to use. Fortunately, it interfaces well with a computer, to boot. There is a USB cable included that, once plugged in, lets you access your images through Kodak's includes software -- pretty standard stuff. I don't use that feature much at all because I've got a card reader on my computer, so I simply pull the SD card out of the camera, slap it in my computer and treat the card like another disc drive. I can manipulate images all day long with The Gimp (great open source software that's both free and similar to Adobe PhotoShop), so why bother with yet another software program? Of course, the images are in standard JPEG format, so transferring them to a computer and editing them is a simple task.

Also, this is designed to fit into a photo printer so that pictures can be had easily. That's nice and all, but I haven't used that once. It's cheaper for me just to grab the SD card, head down to Walgreen's and print photos all day long.

Now, don't go thinking this camera is perfect. This is an inexpensive item and, as such, there are some problems with it. The most noticeable thing is that the flash is small, quite hot and doesn't do much to combat the age-old problem of "red eye." Yes, so photos show up -- far too often -- with people who look like they are possessed by demons, animals appear to have blue or green glowing eyes and etc. This camera might be too much like the "point and shoots" from the 1980s, indeed. That's a limitation I've learned to deal with over time and it's not as bad as it sounds. Kodak ought to be a bit ashamed for their solution to the problem. There is some built-in, red eye reduction, but it doesn't completely solve the problem and it's far too easy to forget to turn it on, anyway.

Another drawback is that this thing simply sucks batteries down like nobody's business. It takes "AA" batteries and drains them faster than a fat man inhales a milkshake. We wound up purchasing Kodak's Mi-MH Rapid Batter Charger and two sets of battery packs (one came with the charger) for another $30. Yep, that camera just got a bit more expensive, didn't it? Throw in another $10 for a small camera bag to hold the camera, the charger and batteries and the bill went up a bit more.

And, speaking of expense, you've just got to get an SD card because the internal memory is pitiful. You won't go far with that, so plan on plunking down a bit more for the SD card (fortunately, those are pretty cheap -- seems like we paid around $30 for one of those).

But, in the end, we got a complete digital camera system that is great for our needs for around $170. That's a bit higher than the $99 entry fee for this thing, but it's still pretty cheap and the camera has held up pretty well -- it's been lugged all over the state for holiday pictures and we've used it almost every day since we got it and we've had no problems. It comes with a one-year warranty that seems to let the company off the hook if the camera is damaged because it's been dropped or exposed to moisture (I suspect that most problems will be blamed on one of those two conditions if push comes to shove). I have no idea if Kodak's customer service is worth a flip if anything goes wrong, but I don't really care, either. At this price, I'll toss this thing out the closest window if it malfunctions and get another one.