Great camera for the price

This was not our first digital camera.  We had gotten what I thought was a great deal on another camera on one of those discount websites but that experience reiterated for us the concept of "you get what you pay for."

Kodak Easy Share put a slight dent in that concept.  A good, happy dent.

For roughly the same price we bought this camera and instantly liked it far better than the old one.  The old one was made by some company I'd never heard of; this one was a Kodak, so I naturally expected more out of it.  We were not disappointed.

I've read some of the other reviews of this product here, and was utterly baffled that some folks complained of short battery life with this camera.  I can only guess that this is their first digital camera.  Either that or I would love to see what they consider long battery life because we've been quite happy with this camera's appetite.  Indeed, the old camera gobbled up even Duracel lithium batteries specifically designed for use in digital cameras.  We would get maybe 15 flashes out of that camera (maybe 8 with ordinary batteries).  With this Kodak, we routinely get through an entire Thanksgiving Day without changing batteries once.

Let me stop right there and confess that I am a pictures guy.  If it happened in my life there are probably 600 pictures of it on a hard drive or in a shoebox (for you kiddies, in the age before digital cameras and personal computers, people had cameras that used something called "film" and you had to mail the film to some company on Jupiter who usually turned the film into photographs and mailed them back so you could look at them once and stuff them into a shoebox for 30 years).  That means we use this camera almost every day.  Go take a look at my MySpace page and you'll see I'm not joking.  I take pictures of EVERYTHING.  We saw some cool spiders in the yard -- that resulted in 42 pictures, maybe 8 of which made it to MySpace.  I saw some nifty mushrooms under a hedge -- same deal.  Fed the ducks?  79 pictures.  My youngest son had a ballgame?  195 pictures of each game.  So to say that we get a lot of use out of this camera is a bit of an understatement.  Yet, I have never once been unhappy with the battery life in this camera, except for the time Julie bought a package of Joe's Discount Batteries when they were on sale at Shaw's Supermarket -- I was not happy with those, but that's hardly surprising.

Here is a good place to mention that if you're a photographer looking to win an award or to fill out your portfolio, this is not the camera for you.  But you already knew that.  I mention it for those Joneses who insist on buying the Best Camera On Earth even if they only take pictures every other Christmas.  This is not for you, either.  Sony makes a great camera in your price range, as does Nokia and probably 12 other companies.  This is a Kodak.  It's CALLED "EasyShare."  I think that should tell you for which consumers this camera was designed.

Given that criterion, this camera is a winner.  Kodak was shooting (no pun intended) for the Joe Average consumer who doesn't need the techno-babble of a professional photographer, who does not want complexity and who isn't trying to win a Pulitzer for Best Picture in a News Magazine.  Kodak was trying to please the soccer mom taking a picture of her 7-year old's birthday party (the one at which Uncle Bill drank too much and threw the Wii controller into the fish tank), her 12-year old's shot on goal (the one that went wide of the net as the clock ran out and cost them the playoffs), and maybe shoot some naughty vids of her and hubby on a Saturday night.  Okay, actually it's not so good for that last one, as the camera does not shoot low-light video, although there's probably an attachment you can buy if you're really determined.

Speaking of video, that's the one time this camera does seem to go through batteries, but that's hardly surprising.  We use this feature mainly at ballgames while my son is batting.  I shoot video of the pitcher's delivery so that I'm sure to catch the hit, when he makes one.  If he fouls-off, or it's a ball or strike, I can immediately delete that shot but it still uses a lot of juice to take 30 or 40 short vid-clips even though I wind up coming home with only 5 or 6 keepers.  Whether I keep them or delete them, it still takes electricity to shoot them.  So I can't blame the camera for that.

Performance-wise it's not bad.  As I said, it's not a pro-quality gizmo.  But for its intended market it does a competent job at a good price.  Sometimes the autofocus gets fooled by objects in the foreground, such as when I tried to shoot pictures of birds out the kitchen window and the camera insisted on focusing on the dang window screen, no matter what I did.  It also gets confused in low-light conditions in crowds, like the time we were at the steakhouse and I tried to snap a photo of the waitresses line-dancing, but the camera insisted on lighting the potted plant off to the right-hand side, leaving the more-distant waitresses in complete darkness.  But as frustrating as that was, such things are few and far between.

One thing that does seriously annoy me about this camera, and might actually cause me to upgrade later this year to a much nicer model, is the goofy simplicity of the menus.  As I said, for the regular Joe this is a simple-to-use camera.  99% of the time, that's all we need and it does a great job.  But every now and then I want to do something "nifty" with my camera, like take a great action shot of my son sliding into home plate or a dog leaping into the air to catch a Frisbee.  Although I am no professional, I do know you need a faster shutter speed to get a clean, crisp, sharp photograph under those conditions.  Action requires speed.  With this camera, you can change your shutter speed.  It even makes recommendations for things like Action/Sports, which was helpful.  But to my everlasting annoyance, the changed setting lasts for ONE PICTURE ONLY.  If you want to use that setting for another picture you have to meander you way through the menu system, make the change, and then shoot ONE PHOTOGRAPH, and then do the whole process all over again.  Can I just say this one little thing?  YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME.  There, I feel better now.

Really, that's a small problem.  Most people probably won't even bother messing with those settings, which I'm sure explains how that crappy menu design made it into production in the first place.  But it did annoy me.  Similar problem with the self-timer.  You can take ONE picture using the self-timer, and if you want to take another one, you must go into the menu to reset the self-timer all over again.  That's annoying, and in fact is a problem we encounter far more often than the shutter speed menu problem, but it's not as annoying as the other because it's just a couple of menu screens (like mouse-clicks) involved in setting the self-timer, while changing the shutter speed takes about a week.

This camera has a comparatively weak 3X optical zoom, augmented by a digital zoom.  This is sufficient for most applications, but if your subject is more than, say, 50 feet away and you want a good tight shot you will find the digital zoom grainy and lackluster.  Again, that's fine for ordinary home use, but picture-taking guys like myself are not satisfied with it.  This doesn't come up that often, though.  For the price, this is a very minor complaint.

Unlike the old camera, the software that came with this Kodak worked well.  It installed flawlessly, and works properly every time without crashing.  The one problem with it might not be the software; it might be my PC.  When transferring files from the SD card to the PC, there is an option to delete the files after uploading, but more often than not the files are still on the card after the whole process is complete.  That's a small problem, as inserting the card back into the camera and using the menus to delete everything on the card works every time.  
The firewire that came with the camera has never been tried because we also bought the 2-GB SD card so we use that for all transferance to the PC.  I highly recommend this route, since the cards are very inexpensive these days -- the 2-GB I think was less than $20 -- and you can take your pictures anywhere using the card.  If you go with the firewire you don't have as much flexibility, plus the SD card greatly expands your camera's capacity.

Another complaint I saw in some of the other reviews was the delay between pressing the button and the camera actually taking a picture.  Again, I must suppose this was their first digital camera.  That delay is common to most (I hear not all anymore) digital cameras and is inherent in the digital processing that goes on inside the camera as the little computer struggles with all the computations that go into making sure your photograph comes out right.  First it sends little bat-like sonic pulses, like SONAR, to calculate the auto-focus.  Then it measures the lighting and tries to figure out exactly what you're trying to photograph.  It emits a preflash, supposedly to cut down on red-eye (don't tell Greg Gutfeld).  Then once all those things take place, and probably a few things of which nobody is aware because they transpire secretly like bureacracy -- then and only then, is the shutter allowed to do its shutterly thing.

Seriously, this is a problem inherent to digital photography, something picture guys have been complaining about for years.  This is why a lot of professional photographers still use old-school film cameras.  But with a little practice and some forethought, you can adapt to this drawback.  The advantages inherent in digital photography -- the instant-review capability, the instant-delete function, the high capacity, the ease of development, etc -- make this a minor inconvenience for the most part.  It does hinder action pictures, though.  If you're trying to shoot that shot-on-goal at little Tammy's soccer game, you've got to shoot just a hair before she actually kicks the ball.  It can be done, but you've really got to be on the ball (no pun intended -- really).  I hear they are coming out with digital cameras that exhibit no noticeable delay, but they are still pricey.  A friend has a Sony that cost her $400, and while its delay is significantly shorter than the one with this Kodak, I am not sure it justifies the higher price tag.  A lot of other features of that camera taken together might jusitify it, if you're a serious pictures guy like me -- which is why I am giving thought to upgrading to that camera.  But until we do, we are having no trouble getting by with this Kodak.  It gets the job done simply and easily at a good price.

One last thing, the color LCD display while very sharp and clear, is totally blotted out by direct sunlight.  Since there is no optical viewfinder in this camera, that makes picture-taking on a bright sunny day somewhat challenging.  The Sony was better in this department.  

Overall, the Kodak EasyShare is a great camera for the average user, at a very affordable price.  Anyone looking to get into the digital camera arena would not be disappointed with this model.  You can get acquainted with the ins and outs of digital photography very easily with this camera, and then down the road you might decide to upgrade to something more complicated and expensive.  This camera also makes a good gift for a teen going away to college or going on a trip.  Really, at $90 it's hard to find anything to complain about with this camera.