Snap It Up Today (Kodak Easyshare DX3600)

Member Name: tigbeater

Product:	Kodak Easyshare DX3600
Date:	11/12/01 (301 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Point and Click, Optical & Digital Zoom, Movies with Sound

Disadvantages: Software slow with lots of pictures, 2.2mPix

I recently bought this camera for my company and of course I took out on a test drive for a weekend. The camera is so easy to use, the controls are intuitive and logical. It really is a point and click camera but with the added advantage of being able to junk those snaps that just aren't right.

One of the features which Kodak don't really shout about is the video mode. Other cameras I have looked at can give give you short bursts of video but this wee beast can shoot video with sound to the limit of the memory. (The camera reports nearly 5 mins with the 64mB memory card I was using!) The resolution is only about 320x240, but hey - if I wanted to shoot movies I'd use a camcorder! These little clipits are ideal for catching those moments that a picture can't, just enough that your friends don't cringe when you mention they might want a look.

Downloading the pictures is so easy a child could do it. The software installed on my Windows 2000 machine first time with no hiccups. Its just a simple case of plugging the camera onto its charger, hooking in the USB cable and pressing the button on the base unit. The software loads automatically and starts downloading your pictures straight away. The pictures are stored as JPEG and the movies as APPLE Quicktime MOV files. Kodak supply this really easy to use browser, it comes with some basic picture editing functions like brightness, colour and red eye correction. It also has some effects like Sepia / Black & White conversion.

The best feature of the software is the slideshow, it plays back all your pictures / movies so you can show off your entire catalogue with ease. The only problem I found was it was a little slow to move around the thumbnails once I had all 170+ photos / movies of the weekend loaded.

I am contemplating buying a camera myself and having trawled many photography shops / websites, I still haven't found anything that compares for the money, even fro
m Kodak.

It looks like this will be the camera for me.

Summary: