No heads chopped off here! (Kodak Easyshare DX3700)

Name: harlequin1

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Product:	Kodak Easyshare DX3700
Date:	24/06/02 (448 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No developing costs, LCD screen

Disadvantages: n/a

As a parent of 5 kids I think a digital camera is a must. One of the advantages of a digital camera has to be the fact that developing the pictures costs nothing.

If you are an expert photographer like me…lol! you will know that you spend a fortune getting your pictures developed, wait a couple of days in anticipation for those fantastic snaps and then when they come back there are about 2 good photos. Three with the heads chopped off, two with fingers over the lens, four that are so dark you can’t see what they are supposed to be, one of the floor, one of the inside of your bag and two with so much red eye your subjects could join Demons ‘r’ us.

With a digital camera you don’t have to wait for your photos to be developed. You can load them straight onto your computer, delete all the hopeless ones that you wouldn’t show to your worst enemy, then either print them off or store them on disk for printing later.

You could also take photos for the readers wives pages if you wanted to without the embarrasment of them coming back from the chemist with pornagraphic warnings all over them.

I originally bought a little web cam type digital camera which I thought would be ok as a starter camera, and it was. It took nice little photos which looked ok on the computer but they were not so good when you printed them off or tried to enlarge them. This camera did not have a flash which turned out to be pretty annoying.

This year we have three weddings to attend so I decided to invest in a “proper” digital camera.

I have to admit I don’t know very much about photography or cameras so I did ask around a lot before I bought one.

I set myself a limit of £300 and went shopping.

After a full day going from camera shops to computer shops back to camera shops, checking out websites and asking advice here there and everywhere I eventually bought a Kodak DX3700.


Kodak is a very well established company that have been making cameras since time began. (well seems like it anyway) You know it is a name that you can trust.

I paid £249.00 for the camera and an extra £30.00 for a memory card which meant that I stayed within my budget. (makes a change)

Now for the technical stuff.
The camera has 3.1 megapixels, 8mb internal memory and 3x digital zoom.

So what does all that mean in English then?
Basically the greater the amount of pixels the better quality the picture. After that my technical knowledge is sketchy.

What I do know however is this camera is very easy to use.

There isn’t hundreds of buttons and switches to confuse yourself with, basically its point and go.

When you first switch the camera on it takes a while to check the memory/ memory card. With 8mb of memory you can take 8 best quality photographs which are good for enlargements, 18 better quality photographs, which are normal snapshot quality or 66 good quality photographs which are ok for websites or emails.

I paid the extra £30.00 for a 32 mb memory card. This means that as well as what can be held on the internal memory I can take another 30 best quality, 68 better quality or 249 good quality.

The camera has a macro mode which apparently means you can take pictures at a distance of 6 to 20 inches away from the lens. Why you would want to do that I have no idea, but each to their own.

You can date stamp all your photos which I think is a great idea. My kids do tend to ask “how old was I when you took that picture?” and being as organised as I am I rarely remember to write on the back of them.

It also has various flash modes. You can set the flash so that if you are taking photos of people it eliminates red eye, auto flash for subjects other than people or fill flash for when bright light comes from behind the subject.

When you have took a
picture you can view it immediately on the lcd screen. This means that if you have chopped the head off or stuck your finger in the way you can delete it straight away, leaving you room in your memory to take good pictures.

The lcd screen is a marvellous thing. You can use this to take your pictures instead of using the view finder. This means you can see what your photo will look like before you take it. Good eh?

Using the lcd screen does zap your batteries though so you do have to be a bit careful.

The software supplied with the camera is pretty good. It makes loading your pictures onto your computer really easy.

Plug the docking bay into your usb port. Sit the camera on the docking bay, press the button and the photos are loaded straight onto your computer into a folder with the date of your photos.

The software also enables you to enhance, enlarge and print your photos as well as view them on a slideshow on your computer.

After the first wedding of the year I came away with 38 cracking photos which I was able to send to all my friends and relatives before they had even had chance to take their films into Boots to be developed. How cool is that?

Summary: