Kodak - Easyshare DX4900 review

Kodak supplied both its DX4900 camera and the optional EasyShare USB dock into which it plugs. The camera alone is a similar price to the others in this group.

The DX4900 has a chunky and rather utilitarian design, full of bumps and lumps. On its back panel is a four-way thumb control and two other buttons with which you can navigate the menu system, which appears on the 38mm colour LCD display. Unusually, the top surface of the camera also contains a mono LCD, for status information like the number of shots remaining.

A 2x optical zoom lens powers out of the front at switch on and, with a further 3x digital zoom, provides a good degree of magnification. The built-in software makes effective use of this, enabling you to magnify a shot within the camera and pan around it on the LCD.

The 4-Mpixel CCD array produces large files and a 16MB CompactFlash card is provided to hold them. A single use, Lithium battery provides power if you buy the camera on its own, but a rechargeable NiMH pack is included in the version with the bundled dock. The battery recharges all the time the camera is docked.

Our test macro image came out very well on this camera, with the huge magnification available from its maximum 2,448 x 1,632 resolution. The landscape picture was also well reproduced and again can be zoomed to show the fine detail.

The DX4900 is an effective digital camera with great flexibility of control, including manual focus and exposure adjustment if needed. It's a shame Kodak's industrial designers still feel it has to look like a £40 'Brownie', though.

Kodak - EasyShare LS633 review

Kodak's 3.1-megapixel EasyShare LS633 is the world's first camera to use an OLED display instead of the more traditional LCD display. It's a stylish design offering good features and image quality.

The undoubted star of the EasyShare LS633 is the amazing 2.2-inch, 112,000-pixel OLED screen. OLED - or more correctly AMOLED (Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode) - is a technology which Kodak has pioneered, and which it will brand under the name NeVue.

Unlike in a conventional LCD display, where the shades of light are blocked by the liquid crystal, in an OLED display each pixel generates its own light, hence there's no need for a backlight. The resulting image has a higher colour contrast than an LCD display. It also supposedly improves the battery life, although we didn't find that to be the case, mainly due to the sheer size of the EasyShare LS633's screen.

That screen comes into its own when you view it at an angle; images remain clear, crisp and vivid even when getting close to Kodak's claimed viewing angle of 165 degrees. They also remain clear and crisp even in sunlight.

Aside from this screen, the other important piece of technology is the 3.1-megapixel CCD sensor. This allows images to be captured up to a resolution of 2,041 x 1,533 pixels, good for prints up to 14 x 11 inches. The lens has a 3x optical zoom and is, as with most recent Kodak cameras, made by the German company Schneider-Kreuznach.

The lens has a range from F2.7 to 4.6 and a focal range of 5.6 - 16.8mm (equivalent to 37 - 111mm on a conventional 35mm camera). Captured photographs are perhaps a little over exposed and a little soft on things like trees or grass, but in general the images are sharp and well defined with good, natural colours.

The rest of the EasyShare LS633's features are what you would expect from today's point and shoot cameras. The manual options are simple and easy to use and include exposure metering and compensation, focus setting and light metering (up to ISO 400); the only thing missing is a manual setting for white balance.

The camera also has a "Capture always Ready" feature that allows you to snap a picture in any camera function mode, and although you can't frame the picture with the OLED when doing so, it does allow a picture to be taken, even if you are currently reviewing images.

The EasyShare LS633 can be used in video mode - it has built-in speakers and a microphone. Videos are saved in QuickTime at a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels and you can get around 81 seconds of video on the internal 16MB memory. For extra memory the camera supports SD and MMC cards.

Using the EasyShare LS633 presents no real problems and for beginners it displays a short description when switching between scene modes, helping you to make the right choice. There are six such modes; auto, close-up, landscape, sport, night and burst. To transfer images the camera can be connected to a Kodak cradle, but if you can't afford the extra expense of the cradle (£60), it also has video and USB ports.

Kodak - EasyShare P880 review

The price of digital SLR cameras (dSLRs) continues to fall, but Kodak reckons there's still a niche for a semi-pro compact. The EasyShare P880 can be used as a point-and-shoot camera or switched to semi-auto or manual modes.

A Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon zoom lens offers a 24mm wide-angle, quite a bit wider than you normally see in this class of camera. The 5.8x optical zoom and manual focus adjustments are controlled using rings around the lens column, which are easier to use than a wide-angle / telephoto toggle.

There are lots of different exposure modes in the EasyShare P880, so you can choose everything from full auto, through aperture and shutter priorities, to full manual control, with AE bracketing thrown in, too.

For the first time, Kodak has decided to include RAW support within the camera, so if you want to develop your post-processing skills you can do so here. You'll need an SD or MMC card memory to supplement the 32MB of internal storage, as RAW images from its 8-megapixel sensor take nearly 14MB each.

In use the EasyShare P880 produced generally well-balanced images, though there was some fringing. Shot-to-shot times are below average, too, particularly if you shoot in RAW or TIFF. True, this is an 8-megapixel sensor, but convenience of use is still important.

Ergonomically, the EasyShare P880 isn't great. The right-hand grip is too close to the lens barrel for most people's fingers and there's no convenient space to rest your right-hand thumb. There's a total of 15 buttons dotted around the back and top panels, as well as a mode selector dial, a four-way jog-dial and a three-way power switch; photo, off, replay.

While most of these single-function buttons, like the one to switch between the electronic viewfinder and the large, 65mm LCD display, are welcome, they do make the learning curve steeper. Balanced against this, the wide range of controls gives you plenty of scope for setting the EasyShare P880 up exactly as you want it. It has a Program button, too, to which you can assign a set of user parameters.

The EasyShare part of the camera's name shows it's compatible with Kodak's printer port plus series 3, a thermal dye printer which can produce 15 x 10cm (6 x 4-inch) prints directly from the camera. The adapter plate is supplied with the camera and, when clipped onto the top of the printer, enables you to plug the EasyShare P880 in directly and use its monitor screen to select and perform simple edits on your images, before printing them.