Nice camera, shame about the image quality

2.5 Stars

I bought one of these for my wife two months ago and she is quite happy with it, so I guess it is a successful gift, but I find it has a number of shortcomings, most significant of which is the image quality.

A few months ago my wife and I became dissatisfied with our existing 5mp digital cameras, an HP R707 for her, mine a Pentax Optio 555 compact prosumer camera (full manual controls, originally $600). We have a two-year old who is very fast moving and is apt to do something fun, cute and memorable at the drop of a hat many times a day. Our existing cameras took nice photos (better than virtually any compact digital cameras on the market today) but were somewhat slow to start up and slow to recharge the flash, meaning we were finding ourselves often missing photos altogether or taking blurry ones of a toddler already running away after the photographic moment had passed. We also wanted a camera with better quality video than our old cameras that would be easier to transfer onto a PC than downlaoding our Samsung Mini-DV digital camcorder at real-time speed.

I tried out virtually every compact camera on the market available locally, except Olympus (they did not appear to offer anything significant to justify switching formats to XD memory cards) and ultimately bought three other cameras before we settled on this M883. First, I bought an 8mp Samsung S850 for $150, a camera I really liked in many ways (outstanding build quality, very comfortable to shoot one-handed, full manual controls with simple menus, higher definition video 800x596, lots of features, very nice outdoor image quality) but ultimately returned it because it fell short in four key areas: start-up time (average, maybe 3-4 seconds), flash recharge time (below average, maybe 5-6 seconds), indoor image quality (grainy and dark - not very bright lens); and very poor battery life.

Next, I bought a pair of Kodaks, including the very compact 7mp M753 for $129 and the 12mp Z1275 that has HD video, at 1280x720 resolution, for $219. We returned both of them, finding the images they produced to be very grainy, particularly indoors. You can check out my review of the Z1275 here for details on why that one went back. However, there were several things we really liked about the M753, in particular, its very speedy performance. It started up in about 1.5-2.0 seconds and it has, hands down, the fastest flash recharge times of any compact camera on the market(and I spent a number of hours testing the flash recharge times of every compact camera in any store selling digital cameras in town, including Casios - generally acknowledged as about the fastest performing compact cameras) - you could fire off three flash photos in under five seconds. Furthermore, the M753's flash was very bright and useful out to 20ft, which puts to shame the flashes on most digital cameras including the vastly larger superzooms. It also had a nice macro mode, along with a super compact size and very easy to use menus and controls. Video was decent at the usual VGA 640x480 resolution. However, there was virtually no way to control image quality other than ISO settings and anything over the lowest one produced very grainy photos. Indoor photos without flash were really bad and even with flash, they were still fairly grainy. Although a nice looking camera in a metallic copper plastic, the build quality felt a bit cheap.

One day about three weeks after buying the two Kodaks, I noticed Best Buy had the 8mp M883 model on sale for $149, which was $50 off usual price. It appeared to be based on the same electronics as the M753, as they were almost identical in size, but had several key differences, namely a very nice metallic red, aluminum body instead of the thin plastic one, controls were on a three-position slider (P, Scene, Video) and in menus instead of the usual dial on top, and it had a lot more user-adjustable settings. We decided to go for it and return the other two Kodaks. We have used it for two months and have taken probably 600 photos and several hours of video with it. However, if it was up to me, I probably would have returned it, too, although we would have had to eat Best Buy's $22.50 15% restocking fee.

FEATURES AND SPECIFICATIONS

This camera has about as much adjustability as any digital camera could without having outright full manual controls. It is set out of the box for the usual auto settings in the default P mode, in which the camera controls everything and it also has 22 scene modes including sports, macro, portrait, document, night portrait, night landscape, museum mode (for indoor no-flash photos) etc.... You can also do numerous adjustments in the P mode, including setting ISO levels between 64 and 3200, but the high ISO range is not important since photos above ISO 200 are pretty awful with the M883. Any ISO setting beyond 800 is of no use whatsoever and is just a marketing gimmick on any currently-available camera shy of a DLR. You can also set file quality (std, fine, superfine), change the exposure settings +-2.0 E.V. in 1/3 E.V. stops, change white balance, even change to a long-exposure bulb mode with a shutter speed adjustable between .5 and 8 seconds.

The M883 has a 38x114 mm (35 mm equiv.) f/3.1 - f/5.9 Kodak lens which is pretty typical for an ultra-compact digital camera, although lacking in both the speed (should be at least a f/2.8) and range (a 28mm or even better, 24mm wide angle would have been really useful). It has a very small (but again, not untypical) 1/2.5 in. CCD sensor, which explains the lack of detail and low light performance noted below.

So, having established our criteria and this camera’s functions, here are the pros and cons:

PROS:

- Nice build quality with the all-metal body, very sharp appearance in metallic red.

- Very small and pocketable - a bit smaller than a thin deck of cards

- More manual settings than most cameras without full manual controls, which, if used properly, will give you better photos than the Kodak M753 or M853.

- Nice macro mode - focuses both close at 3" and further away from maybe 20" for doing photos of items for sale on eBay auction listings

- Video mode is quite nice - decent VGA (640x480) resolution, decent framerates, can zoom optically (which is fairly rare)

- Moderately quick performance and flash recharge times

- Good color accuracy, for which Kodak is well-known, can be adjusted to several warmth settings as well as B&W and sepia.

- Nice, big 3"LCD screen, good in bright light.

- Good, simple and intuitive menus.

CONS:

- Like all other current model Kodaks, except possibly the Z712 and Z812, the M883 has grainy photos, particularly in low light and indoors situations. I haven't really tested it to see what sort of pincushioning, barrel distortion or chromatic aberrations it might have, but printed indoor photos really don't look good blown up beyond a 4"x6" size, either from Snapfish/Walgreens or on our Canon photoprinter and you probably won't want to go above 8x10 . Although this is an 8mp camera, my 5mp Pentax takes much, much better photos all around and has better sharpness, detail, lower noise (in fact, I never even notice image noise with the Pentax). Shooting with ISO set to 64 helps (definitely switch off the auto-ISO setting), but not enough. In fact, I have taken several photos of people and animals at the zoo with my 2mp Canon A20 (very basic point and shoot purchased in 2001) that I believe are superior to anything this Kodak can take.

- Flash recharge times are much slower than the M753 - they may be the same size and mostly look alike, but two factors I didn't consider before we bought this camera significantly reduce the M883's flash performance: it has a somewhat smaller lithium rechargeable battery, combined with a larger, power-sapping screen. It also doesn't have as long of a range as the M753's flash, maybe only 10-12ft.

- Very slow-writing, annoying file buffer -every 2-3 shots it kicks in and causes the whole camera to pause for 10 seconds while it writes to the memory card (using a 2gb PQI Class 4 SD card - I've got an extremely fast 1gb 150x MMC card I'll try and see if that helps).

- Somewhat slick and difficult to hold one-handed.

- Controls very small - if you have large hands, it's hard to reach those 2.5mm diameter buttons and the small, thin, recessed power button on top is hard to press if you're in a hurry and impossible if you're wearing gloves.

- Poor accessory package. It comes with battery, USB computer cable with adaptor, software CD and a wriststrap, plus 64mb of built-in internal memory that will hold a few photos, nothing more. No battery charger is included - you plug it into your computer's USB port to charge. No video cable - you can't plug this into your TV unless you buy either the HDTV dock for around $100, another Kodak dock for around $70 or else buy an aftermarket or other model Kodak video cable (which we did for $8 off eBay, gives very grainy resolution that doesn't do justice to the fully video capabilities, but it was fascinating for my daughter to see herself on TV). Otherwise, you'll need to download your photos and burn them to a CD-R or DVD-+R.

- No optical viewfinder - you just use the screen.

- No optical or mechanical image stabilization. The digital IS with this camera is just a gimmick (as are all digital image stabilization or shake reduction systems, such as those on Samsungs), jacking up your ISO numbers, ostensibly to allow faster shutter speed to reduce blur, but all it does is make the photos grainier. On a camera with a 3x lens (probably anything under a 10x lens), unless you have a medical condition or have a 16 cups of coffee a day habit and haven't had any caffeine that day, any sort of blur from hand shake will be minimal and the extra noise from the high ISO setting will have a much more detrimental impact on your image quality than a slight amount of blur.

- Face detection feature is just a gimmick - serves no real purpose if you have any basic knowledge of photography. It does spot faces or at least heads more than half the time, but I am used to doing a focus lock (aiming at a person's body, pressing the shutter half-way, keeping it half pressed and then centering the viewfinder to how you want to frame the photo). That works perfectly well, avoids having the focus on some distant object between two people who were the subjects of the photo and I have seen no improvement in focusing shots using the the face detection feature.

- Comes with Kodak Easyshare software, but I have heard that, like the photo software from most other camera manufacturers, it is much less useful than commercial or even some freeware photo editing and storing programs (Paint, a freeware program downloadable from http://www.download.com/Paint-NET/3000-2192_4-10338146.html?tag=toprated is actually quite a good basic photo editor and its auto fix modes are better than some commercial programs auto fix options.) Even worse, Kodak's software is supposed to be very difficult to uninstall fully from your computer. I have not tried it, but will probably install a version of it soon for my other camera, a Kodak P880, which has the no-loss, no-compression RAW file capture capability and which I understand needs the Kodak software to download photos in RAW format.

Conclusion:

This camera would make a nice bring-everywhere camera for coat pocket, purse or glove compartment when it is more important simply to get the shot than to obtain the finest quality image. If you want a camera to take photos of fast moving children, the M883 has faster than average performance and is definitely better than the Nikons and Canons, speed-wise. The various Casio models all have faster start-up and flash recharge times, higher resolution video plus better image quality, though, than this Kodak, so if you want to get something almost identical to this Kodak but better, your best bet is a Casio. However, if you are primarily looking for a digital camera with fast flash recharge times, the cheaper M753 is the camera to buy. If you want a camera that is good for low light photography, the Fujifilm F40fd is the camera to get and it will perform better in low lighting situations, with or without a flash, than any other compact camera on the market - I would have bought one but for the very average start-up and flash recharge times. If start-up and flash recharge times and low-lighting photography are not an issue for you and if you don't intend to use the video function much (Canons eat up memory in video mode worse than any other brand), get a Canon instead.