snaptastic! (Kodak DC3200)

Member Name: kimgraham

Product:	Kodak DC3200
Date:	04/01/02 (186 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: inexpensive, easy to use

Disadvantages: fairly bulky, memory cards, expensive

I grew up in a very "photographic" background. My uncle is a professional landscape photographer, my grandfather was an avid semi-professional photographer and Dad has always been a very keen amateur. My sister and I had our own cameras from the age of 7 and were always encouraged to use them frequently.

Until quite recently I really turned up my nose at the thought of a digital camera! It could not possibly be the same as an SLR (Single Lens Reflex), and it somehow seemed like cheating! I saw some work a friend had done with a digital camera and thought that perhaps they had a niche. I do not believe that it will ever replace my "proper" camera, but it has its own use and is great fun.

Last year I finally succumbed and bought myself a Kodak DC3200 digital camera. They cost about £150, although this can vary, and it is a very good beginners camera.

It is black and not one of the smallest digital cameras I have seen. It will fit in my handbag, but my bag is quite big!! It doesn't look to me, particularly funky, but the results be-lie the look of the camera.

I took it to my parents golden wedding celebrations (along with my SLR) and it must be said that the photos were of a perfectly good quality. I did get a bit of stick from my Uncle and father, both of whom ribbed me constantly about my "cheats" camera!


ABOUT THE CAMERA:

It takes photos which can be printed off up to 5"x7", according to Kodak's literature. I have tried up to A4 with reasonable success if I use my Adobe 6 software, rather than the one that comes with it!

It has a CCD RESOLUTION of 1.2 megapixels (1280x960)

IMAGE RESOLUTION of 1.0 megapixels (1152x864 on high)
(576x432 on standard)

IMAGE QUALITY SETTINGS: you have a choice of Best, better or good. The higher the quality you set the fewer photos you get in the memory. This is not a problem if you have bou
ght an extra memory card, more about that later.

VIEW FINDER: Optical

LENS: 5.4mm, aperture f3.6. It is a fixed focus camera, which will work from two feet to infinity.

EXPOSURE: This is automatic and the shutter speed varies from 1/4 to 1/500 of a second.

WHITE BALANCE:

This is a feature I like about this camera. You can set the camera to adjust for different types of light. This gives you more realistic colour and white whites! Sounds like a Persil advert doesn't it!!

The light settings are: automatic, daylight, tungsten and fluorescent. You have to remember to set this. It is easy to forget! It does make a significant difference to the quality of your picture.

LCD DISPLAY:

The camera has an LCD display and you can see exactly what you are taking rather than only relying on the viewfinder. You can also look at what you have just taken and decide whether or not to keep it. This can be very handy when taking a group photo- you never know who will pull a face at the last minute or whose little darling will be caught on camera picking their nose!! The little display monitor is 1.6" square. It sounds small, but in use is more than adequate.

FLASH:

As you would expect, there is flash on the camera. It works from 5-8 feet. You can set it to Auto, Fill-in or Off. I have not had any undue problems with red eye on this camera, which is nice.


ISO EQUIVALENT: 100 ISO. This is like using a bog standard film for all light conditions that are not especially bright.

FILE FORMAT: JPEG

POWER: 4xAA alkaline batteries. We get about 20 hours from the batteries, which isn't too bad.

MEMORY:

The camera has an inbuilt memory of 2 MB and my camera came with a compact flash card with an extra 4mb. Once I realised how much we would use the camera I purchased an extra card with 16 MB. I never run out of memory now!! On the inbuilt memor
y I get about 4/5 photos on the best quality setting. You get more out of the lesser settings.

WEIGHT:

The camera weighs about 215 grams without the batteries, so it is quite light.

It comes with the standard 1 years guarantee.


Now, you will need to know your system requirements:

WINDOWS 95 or above
Pentium 90MHZ or above
RAM: Min 32mb unless you have Windows 2000 and that for some reason needs 64mb!
CD-ROM drive
Serial port
Mouse
Colour Monitor with 256 colours.

WHAT DO YOU GET?

The camera (obviously!)
Wrist strap
Software
Batteries
Serial cable

OPTIONAL EXTRAS:

Extra memory cards
USB picture card reader (this makes downloading significantly faster)
AC Adapter
Video out cable

Lens cap. Now this annoys me. Why on earth is the lens cap an extra? Surely to goodness that ought to come as part of the camera?

I recommend this camera. For the money it is a nice bit of kit. When you buy the compact flash cards they can seem very expensive. Bear in mind the fact that you use them virtually limitlessly and what you are saving in film and developing costs!

The photographic paper comes in all sizes but you tend to have to look for "real photo" sizes. I don't know about you, but I don't really want A4 photos!! Photo paper can also seem expensive, but bear in mind my previous comment. Also, with a digital camera you might decide not to print everything off, as you can store them on the computer or CD-ROM to look at later or show (bore) your friends and family! You have the flexibility to only print off the ones you really like. Look out for offers on photo paper; they do come up from time to time.

Ooh, a reminder! If you are printing on photo paper don't forget to set the printer accordingly. I recently had some dubious quality prints as I had left the printer set to "standard&qu
ot; paper. I should have known better, but it is easily done!

You can have great fun with photographic software. Not only can you remedy the colour, contrast etc and generally improve your photo, but also you can play around and get all sorts of special effects. This isn?t peculiar to my camera or software so it probably isn't appropriate to go into too much detail here, but have a mess around-it?s great fun!


It is a fairly simple camera to use .On the back there are 5 buttons not including the power switch. There is an easy to use menu button, two scrolling buttons, a selector button and one for the flash.

The menu is easy to use and everything you need to use, apart from the flash, is in there. You can also choose your language.

All in all an excellent camera for the price.

Summary: