Kodak EasyShare Z712 Digital Camera

I want to begin by agreeing with everything that shamino says in his review of this camera. If you are thinking that a good camera has to be made in Japan, this one can change your mind. I paid $180 plus tax (at Dell.com using PayPal) and couldn't be happier. At that price, you will need to add some useful accessories, namely, a CRV3 Lithium Ion battery, a charger and an SD card (I found a battery and charger locally for $40 and a 2 GB SD card at 6ave.com for $25 with free shipping and a $20 rebate).

The lens is phenomenal and the autofocus works very well. The image stabilization is just super and if you have any inkling of how much magic is required to do what it does, you've got to be impressed.

I'm of the opinion that 7.1 megapixels is a lot. I normally think digital zoom is a worthless feature (they should call it pseudo-zoom or automatic cropping). The Z712 has a 4.2 power digital zoom (you can turn it off or access it continuously or after a pause). However, with 7 megapixels, you can use, say, a doubling with the digital zoom and get 24 power and still have 3.5 megapixels left.

The movies record with sound and you can zoom while recording. There is a mode where you can shoot a movie without holding down the shutter release. The playback of the movies is very nice and even includes sound but the speaker is small and quiet.

The camera is fully automatic, or can use aperture priority, shutter priority, about a dozen pre-defined scene modes (protrait, fireworks, macro, etc.), fully manual and a very nice "Program" mode which is as automatic or as manual as you like.

The controls are well thought out and easy to get to. Manually focusing a digital camera with arrow buttons is not easy but Kodak gives you a zoomed-in view in the center of the viewfinder or display to help. This is similar to the micro-prisms of film SLRs.

I got excited about some features I read about that turned out not to be on this camera. I would really have liked to be able to use a nicer flash unit so I could shoot bounce flash pictures. Support for RAW and TIFF formats would be nice, too.

I think the panorama mode is really slick but it is limited to stitching 2 or 3 pictures only. Kodak has a "Perfect Touch" feature you can use to edit your photos. It is a one-touch fixer that saves the file as a new, fixed version, or can replace the original. There are no user tweaks with this, it guesses what exposure you wanted and might do some color balancing.

You can crop your pictures right in the camera and this is not too hard to do with the big, bright 2.5 inch display. Or, if you prefer, you can view the same image in the digital viewfinder which works better in direct sunlight or when trying to steady the camera against your forehead.

One other feature I hadn't encountered before is the automatic orientation sensing. Apparently, the camera detects which way is up when the picture is taken and rotates it to put the top up. So all your photos come out properly rotated--very nice!

I have a cheap, 3.3 megapixel pocket camera and felt the need to upgrade. I also have a complete 35mm outfit I've used for 30 years. This just might be the last camera I ever need to own.