Great for 1st time digital camera buyers (Kodak Easyshare CX6330)

Member Name: anonymili

Product:	Kodak Easyshare CX6330
Date:	24/04/06 (202 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good mid - priced digital camera

Disadvantages: Bit heavy and could be smaller in size

My Kodak EasyShare sure lives up to its name - it's easy to share photos taken with it and of all the other cameras I've played with so far (in the shops or tried out friend’s cameras) it comes across as by far the easiest to use!

I've been looking for an excuse to upgrade to a higher spec model but the photos taken with my CX6330 are of such good quality (for my needs anyway) that I can't justify the expense of getting a new camera. Plus the fact that this model has served me well and has had no mechanical faults at all.

I've had the Kodak CX6630 (3.1 mega pixels*) for nearly 4 years now and I still adore it. It comes with its own software CD (Kodak EasyShare) to load on your PC with features such as red-eye reduction.


~*~PRICING~*~

I paid £149.99 for my camera at Dixons as it was on sale, the normal price at the time was £199.99. As expected they tried to sell me the extended guarantee for a third of the price (about £50) but I declined - I've had no mechanical defects with it to date, so there Dixons! You can also buy a printer dock with it, which I didn't opt to buy, so I'm sorry I can't give you any information about it - but this is available for about £80 (or less if you shop around).


~*~USING IT~*~

The camera itself is pretty easy to use. There are three resolution settings - "Good", "Better" and "Best". Pictures taken at "Best" are usually about 1Mb each in size and at "Good" they are about 300Kb each.

You can time and date stamp your photos or even choose to have them in black and white. There's Auto mode (self explanatory I guess but not all that good at the auto-focus when used at night), Sport mode - for subjects in motion , Night-time mode (best to use this indoors in the evenings as auto-focus doesn't come out too clearly), Landscape - for distant scenery, Closeup mode - for subjects less than 28 inches away and you can even take short video clips for up to 2 minutes or so - but be warned - a 10 second video clip can take up as much memory as 5Mb.

You can magnify the photos you've taken on the view screen up to 4 times whilst still on the camera. And of course, you can delete individual pictures or all of them in one go. You can review the pictures as you go along and decide which ones to keep or delete. I tend to keep the Liveview feature off (Liveview shows you a 1 inch by 1.5 inch screen with live feed) as this uses the battery power up pretty fast.

There's also a zoom button but I find that when you zoom in close to subjects the picture quality leaves a lot to be desired, so I usually end up standing really close to things/people I want a closeup of. The 3x zoom feature on the CX6330 is equivalent to a 37-111mm zoom on a regular 35mm lens camera.

The camera comes with a USB lead to connect to your PC and easily download photos. Once connected you can quickly download your photos and decide whether you want to reduce red eye, sharpen images, lighten/darken them, etc. These days I tend to just take out the SD card and insert into the relevant slot on my PC, it takes just moments to download my photos this way and saves all the hassle of playing around with cables.

The only issue I have with the features when using the EasyShare software is that it's quite tedious and can be slow.

I'd definitely recommend getting some rechargeable batteries to use with your Kodak as these cameras drink battery power like water - but then again I guess this applies to most other digital cameras out there, unless someone's not telling me something? Using the “live feed” tends to use up battery power even more so I tend to keep this feature switched off.


~*~PRINTING~*~

It works out fairly economical to get your digital photos printed professionally - all I do is save the photos I want onto a CD and take it down the local print shop - they charge about £8 for up to 70 photos to be developed.

Printing your photos from your colour or black &white deskjet/inkjet/laser printer is fairly easy. Hopefully you already know how to insert pictures into your regular software such as Word, PowerPoint or Publisher and then print as normal. You may need to change your DPI settings when printing to get clearer prints though.


~*~SUMMARY~*~

I'd say all in all, it's pretty nifty for a first time digital camera user and should be suitable for experienced amateurs (like me)! I've taken over 5000 pictures since I've had mine and built up quite an extensive online photo album of weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, evenings out with colleagues, nights out with friends, etc. My friends all laugh when they see me at social events as I'm always "...armed and dangerous with that camera AGAIN!"



* the higher the mega pixels on your camera the higher resolution photos you can take with it...

Summary: For the novice photographer up to an experience amateur

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