Kodak EasyShare Z1275 Digital Camera

I bought this camera to supplement my SLR package. I liked the 2.8f rating, the 5x optical and the HD video recording. The sharing features looked like they could be pretty fun too. I was able to find it online for about $200 so I felt that I was coming out ahead since I'd been planning on spending a bit more.

When I received it, my first impression was that it was a really big camera for a modern point and shoot. Its depth is nearly the width of a credit card...hardly what I'd want to carry around in my pocket in lieu of my huge SLR. Then I picked it up. Fairly light weight, so that's good. But upon pressing buttons I began to see how cheaply the camera was made. The buttons just do not convey quality by any means.

Okay, let's fire this thing up and see what happens. Carefully turning the knob on top so as not to break it, I find that the shooting modes display on the screen. Nice. Only problem is that the screen's display is so short on pixels that the wording is nearly illegible. Fine, I bought it to take pictures with, not to read. So I line up a simple shot and hold the shutter release button down halfway to get the focus and exposure set. It's in focus, it's out of focus, it's in focus, it's out of focus. This goes on indefinitely so I just push the dang button. The flash goes off and I get an apparently decent picture. So I decide to test the camera's supposed 0.3 second recharge time. Pretty close. In actuality I'm able to take about one picture a second for the first 3 pictures in bright light with no flash before it locks up for about 6 seconds.

Aah, now it comes to the light sensitivity. The 2.8f lens means it should be able to take pictures in pretty low light. Couple that with the high ISO rating and you're talking about some high quality dimly-lit photos, right? Well, not so right after all. I took some practice photos in a night club using probably the highest ISO. I would show you the pictures but I can't. I'll explain shortly. Suffice it to say that on the viewfinder the people looked like they were made out of Atari graphics. In other words, in low light the pictures are very grainy and blocky.

After a weekend out including the trip to the club, I get home and try to view my pictures on my PC. I already have the wonderful Kodak software installed so I'm ready to go. I plug the included USB cable into the camera and...nothing! The software won't find the pictures on the camera. The camera won't respond. So I unplug the camera. Still won't respond. I press the power button. Nothing. I actually have to remove the batteries and put them back in to get the camera to respond again. That was no fun, so I pull the memory card (not included) out and stick it into my computer's card reader. Nothing there, or so says the computer. Okay, it just doesn't like the formatting. So I put the card back in and let the windows program grab the pictures. Success at last! The pictures look okay. Since this cam doesn't recognize faces like pretty much every new camera out there, faces are blown out by the flash. So many of the pictures are trash. Fine. How about the videos? First of all, the video image quality is excellent. The audio is surprisingly good. The only problems are that the image stabilization makes the picture unviewably jittery and the white balance bounces back and forth depending on the lighting so the colors are way out of whack. These make the video feature pretty useless. I suppose it might work on a tripod without much action, but how "high definition" is that?

I think I'm going to take the advice I was given earlier and buy a Fuji.