7 out of 7 people found this review helpful.
Not so much.
Date of Review: Apr 20, 2008
The Bottom Line: If possible, find a camera that runs on AA rechargeables and records MPEG video.
The main feature that sold me on this camera was the good 12x zoom lens. In retrospect I should have thought it through further and bought something else.
The camera firmware is pretty basic, although Kodak for some reason thought adding forward/backward seek to the on-camera video playback was a worthy feature. I'd personally prefer facial recognition and intelligent red-eye removal (which I've seen on other cameras), or at least some of the cooler features like colour replacement. It also, for some reason, won't allow you to set macro/longrange on the Auto mode, which is a trifle irritating.
640x480 video is enormously storage-consuming in the format the camera records in. A 2 GB card holds only about 30 minutes, which equates to about 65 MB per minute. Considering that 2 GB can hold 3-4 hours of DivX video, that's not very much. Plus, it records in QuickTime format, so if you want to edit it you'll have to buy QuickTime Pro or some other professional-grade movie editor. (Windows Movie Maker won't import the QuickTime videos.)
The thing that really made me angry, though, was the deceptive way they packaged this. It doesn't clearly specify that, although a "Lithium digital camera battery" is included, it is totally worthless. In my humble opinion a "digital camera battery" should be, by very definition, rechargeable (particularly if the camera won't even run on regular AA-rechargeables). This one isn't, so you'll have to buy a KLIC-8000 and charger from Kodak (needless to say, they're 5 times more expensive than they should be). Kodak's customer support didn't agree that it was deceptive, apparently. At any rate they didn't feel obligated to send me a rechargeable battery for it.
To sum it up: If you want a point-and-shoot that's capable of taking decent pictures even at long range or videos that you can upload to YouTube, you're fine. If you're planning on doing major video-editing, your software will probably read the QuickTime videos, but you'll probably want a dedicated video camera for that. If you want to do some occasional small-scale video editing, buy something that saves videos in MPEG or at least in a format that's more widely supported than QuickTime. At any rate, you'll have to buy a battery and charger for it, so consider that when you're weighing the price of the camera.
