SLEEK, STYLISH AND MINE (Kodak Easyshare V1003)

Member Name: DixieChick101

Product:	Kodak Easyshare V1003
Date:	15/09/08 (132 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great camera, good picture taker

Disadvantages: Shutter lag is just too long

ME AND MY CAMERA

About a year ago, I was starting to receive some money from my job and being in further education and the fact that my mom is on a low income, I get £30 a week just for turning up to college.

I saved every last penny of the £30 and just before Christmas last year went on a little spending spree. For years I had been behind the times, using the old style camera, and then when I went to friends houses and wanted a decent camera I had to use my Nan's Samsung one.

So I decided to have a look for a nice camera. I was on quite a big budget due to the fact I didn't have that much money and knowing me, I tend to break anything too expensive for some reason. Then I saw the Kodak V1003, a nifty little camera in many different colours, sat on the shelf, with the word SALE underneath it.

This was the camera I wanted, I didn't at the time think about the important things I wish I had of, like for example shutter lag and the zoom etc, but still I came out of Curry's with a smile on my face and £130 out of pocket, which included the camera, a 2gb memory and a nice camera case.

THE TECH STUFF

Screen resolution: 10.16 megapixels
Zoom: 3.000
The Screen Size: 2.5inch/6.4cm
Battery: Custom Liton
ISO: 80-16000

THE FEATURES

This section is all of the features that I feel need mentioning about the camera, and why it's good.

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Colour
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One of the main things I had to choose between was the colours, the V1003 has a large range of different colours, all of which look very stylish and have a sort of shimmer to them. Here are the choices:

Pink Shimmer
Java Black
Slate Gray
Red Shimmer
Cosmic Blue
Mystic Purple
Golden Dream
White Glaze
Silver Essence

My Opinion: It wasn't too much of a choice, I immediately fell for the black, I think looking back on it the Purple was the other one I adored, but the Black stood out and I'm glad today that I picked that one. It's a very sharp black and with the silver of the lenses it looks very stylish, and to me it looks more expensive that it actually is.

Rating for Colour Choices = 10/10 (A brilliant section of colours)

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The Buttons
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One of the main things needed when you have a camera is easy to use buttons, especially the on/off button and the shutter button. The on/off button only needs a little push and then the lens comes out, be careful that your hand isn't covering the front of the camera as I nearly damaged the lens by doing this. One of the extra features on this digital camera is it has a video option. On the top of the camera, to the left of the on/off button is three buttons. When you first turn the camera on, there should be a blue light on the nearest button to the on/off button. This is the camera, or the auto button, but something that I have just found out, is this is also the SCN button. Just to the side of that, is the video option, here you can take the videos.

Finally to the left of the video button is the favourites button, at the moment I don't have anything in here, but they show some demo pictures. Now we turn the camera over to look at the main portion of the camera. The back view. Once you have chosen how you want to take your pictures (still/video) this section gives you even more options.

These buttons are very easy to press, it only takes one push and the camera does what you want. On this portion of the camera you also have the zoom in and out button which is just as simple, as is the way you control the camera. The camera and where you want to go is controlled by the joystick on the bottom right hand side of the camera.

My Opinion: This is a good little instrument, I have knocked it several times when I needed to take a picture, and then spent ages working out what the hell I had done, but still this is an easy instrument to use, I think it's so much easier than if they had little buttons to use.

Rating, how easy is it to use the buttons: 9/10 (Very easy, usually you only need to push it once to use it)

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Flash
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To the left of the LCD screen is 5 buttons; the first one is the flash button which lets you do many different things:

The auto flash, which comes when you click the button once, is just when the lighting conditions require it.
The fill flash, which comes on when you click the button twice, is what to use when your taking a picture. This is also good when the picture has light behind it.
The redeye flash, this turns on with three pushes of the flash button and this reduces the red eye in the picture.
And finally the off flash turns on when you push the button four times and is used when you don't want any flash.

My Opinion: I'm never too sure when to use the flash, this is not the camera's fault, and this is my own incompetence.

Rating: 7/10 (I've never had a problem with the flash, however I never know when to use it or not)

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Zoom
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To use the zoom it's pretty simple, especially when you're taking a still picture. All you have to do is use the LCD screen to frame the picture and use the button on the top right corner of the back view screen, this button has the letters T which is used to zoom in (Telephoto) and the letter W is used to zoom out (Wide Angle).

The zoom is really good quality, yesterday I used the camera properly for the first time. By properly I mean at an event where it meant I needed to take good pictures, and I found the zoom to be really useful, however there are some downsides to it, when using the zoom, the picture looses focus when you go into the orange section, by this I mean on the LCD screen when you use the zoom it has a little section where you can see how far you are zooming in, it goes about half way and as long as you stay in the white, the picture is focused very well, however then the lines goes orange and this means the picture is becoming slightly out of focus. Yesterday, when taking pictures I found that as I was so far away from the goal, I needed to go into the orange section, and the pictures came out a lot different than the ones where I stayed in the white area.

My Opinion: The zoom is brilliant on this camera, on my nan's Samsung one the picture quality was ruined very quickly, but you can zoom in pretty far and still get a great zoom picture, however as soon as you get into the orange area, the quality diminishes.

Rating: 8/10 (The only problem I have with this is the fact that the zoom on video is not as good as the still zoom, however, I think the overall quality is pretty good)

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Self Timer
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I've only had to use the self timer once. My family came down and we wanted one with the lot of us, including me, who is usually behind the camera, so I set it up on my mini tripod and found it surprisingly easy to use. All you have to do is to press the menu button and choose the self timer section and then choose how many seconds delay you want the camera to have:

10 seconds: This we found very well, it was just enough time for me to set it up and get into the picture.
2 seconds: I tried this first thinking I would have enough time; however we have a great picture of my bottom covering the camera instead.
2 shot: This is a great one to use, the first picture is taken after a 10 second delay and then the next picture is taken 8 seconds after that. A nice addition.

My Opinion: I think the 10 seconds self timer and the 2 shot self timer are brilliant. If you want to do a family shot, or you want to be in the picture yourself this is a great little addition to the camera. The only problem I had was the 2 seconds one, just because it wasn't enough for what I wanted.

Rating: 9/10 (Very good addition, I've not seen another self timer this good before)

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Scene Modes
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I only found out this section about a week ago when I was trying to understand my camera a little better for this review and for the event on Sunday where I had to take pictures of people playing sport. The different scene modes it offers, which you can get to by pressing the auto/scn button are:

Portrait (to use for full frame pictures)
Sport (I used this section a lot yesterday when I was taking pictures of the football, but didn't really see much different, I actually ended up using the main settings scene)
Custom (this is the one I usually use; I think it gives the best quality pictures)

Landscape, Close-Up, Night Portrait, Self Portrait, Panorama Left-Right, Panorama Right-Left, Anti Blur, Museum, Flower, Fireworks, Text, Beach, Snow, Night Landscape, Children, High ISO, Backlight, Panning Shot, Candle, Sunset.

My Opinion: I had not even realised this little extra was here until recently, and I'm not really going to find myself using them again. When taking some pictures for the portfolio I've got to get together for university, I did some nice flowers pictures and the Flower scene mode made it look brilliant instead of what it looks like normally with the custom scene mode, however it's nothing too special. Just a nice little addition, but I was fine using what I had to start with.

Rating: 6/10 (Nothing too special, it's just a nice addition, not a great need for it)

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Reviewing Pictures/Videos
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To review your pictures and videos, all you have to do is push the button which says review and your pictures will come up with the last picture taken, and using the joystick you can look through all of your pictures and videos. It's pretty easy to watch your videos as well, as all you have to do is push the joystick in and it plays.

My Opinion: This is very simple, when I had my family down, my 80+ year old great grandparents were using the review section and the joystick to look at all of my pictures on the camera, this is people who I had to explain for two whole hours how Instant Messaging works and they still ask me each time I'm on it when they're around, how does that work. This goes to show how simple this section is and really, simplicity is a lot better.

Rating: 9/10 (Very simple to use)

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Kodak Perfect Touch Technology
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One of the things I use quite often is the Kodak Perfect Touch Technology, this is something you can do on the camera and it enhances the quality of the picture. It doesn't change much, but it can really make the different between a dud picture and a good one. A very nice addition to the camera.

My Opinion: This is a lot like the Scene Modes. I actually have programmes that do brilliant editing of pictures for me, so never need to use this, I've only ever used it for the purpose of this review, it's great for people without editing software, but it's not really needed for me.

Rating: 8/10 (Nice little addition, not as good as editing software however)

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Extras
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1) Burst: This mode is another little great thing for the camera; here you are able to take 4 pictures in quick succession. This would be great if it wasn't so hard to access, it is supposed to be used when a sporting moment is happening so you get every bit, but I never know what's coming up, it would be nice that if you just held the shutter down it automatically did this.
2) Picture Resolution: Another great thing on the camera is your able to choose the picture resolution, this means that when you save them onto the computer the pictures are smaller.
3) Long Time Exposure: This is great if you need to worry about shutter lag, which I do, this section you can choose how long the shutter stays open for after you've pushed the button. I have it on the lowest setting.

My Opinion: The extras are just aright, there's nothing that really helps with the quality of the pictures. The Long time exposure is great, however as soon as you've put it onto the lowest setting I'm pretty sure you won't find yourself changing it.

Rating: 6/10 (Nothing too special here)

MY OPINION OF THE CAMERA

Below is my opinion of the main things the camera has and my explanations and opinions.

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Shooting Pictures
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I have played around with shooting pictures with this camera a lot, and I have to say it's pretty good. I have done hundreds of pictures from ones of me and friends to landscape pictures to sporting events, considering that the latter was quite important, I'll talk about the quality I found when using the camera when the subjects were in motion.

I found the start up to take too long, I was only taking pictures really for our football team, and stayed near their goal so to start with I tried turning the camera off to save my battery when they were at the other end of the pitch, but by the time I had turned the camera on, set up the shot, the ball was in the back of the net and the picture came out unfocused.

Shutter lag became a big problem, especially with the action shots. When the players came near, I had to make sure I had the shutter button pressed half way, which sets the focus, then when an action was taking place that I wanted to take a picture of, I pushed it the rest of the way down. This took too long in my opinion, however I do know for a camera with hardly any shutter lag you are looking to pay up to £400+.

The 10 megapixels were brilliant in some pictures but in other's where I used the zoom, they became blurred and out of focus. The detail in the pictures if you don't zoom in too much is brilliant, very crisp and very clear. You get to see quite a lot, I've found that the best pictures are landscapes as the camera just seems to see everything you see and really makes them sharp and look even better than they are.

Rating: 7/10 (Taking still pictures with this camera is really easy, most of the time your able to do it simply and the pictures always turn out brilliantly, however with action shots you have to find yourself well prepared or you miss everything. I managed to get 3 decent shots yesterday that were worthy to get seen by people out of over 50 shots that I took. This was my first time taking action pictures with this camera, so I'll know what to do better next time, but at the moment, I wasn't too happy with the shutter lag etc)

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Battery Life
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I've actually never had the camera conk out on me if you will, if you don't use the camera too much, you will find the battery life will last you up to around 4 weeks I would say, which is brilliant. I think if you used it a lot in one small space of time, the battery goes down considerably, but as long as you keep an eye on the battery, I don't think you'll have a problem.

Charging it up as well couldn't be easier, it comes with a little stand where you can place the camera whilst your charging, so it doesn't fall and break etc, all you have to do is plug the cable into the plug socket and then into the camera. You can see when the camera's done, as when the three blue lights on the top of the camera stop flickering, the camera is fully charged, it only takes a few hours for this to happen.

Rating: 10/10 (The battery life of this camera is magnificent, I'm actually glad that it comes with a battery and you don't have to find yourself putting AA batteries in every time you want to take a picture, I can just plug it in and charge it up and I can use the camera quite a lot before it needs re-charging)

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Transferring Pictures
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I found the easiest way of transferring pictures is to plug in the USB cable into the camera, turn on the camera, and then go straight to My Computer and a little icon should come up for the camera, here you can easily choose the pictures you want and send them to My Pictures. I have been having trouble lately and it doesn't always seem to be connecting to the computer easily, which is annoying as sometimes I need the pictures to be on the computer pretty fast.

Rating: 7/10 (Usually pretty fast, however seems to be taking a lot of time now to connect and a lot of fiddling needs to take place)

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Look & Feel
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Come on girls/guys, this is the most important part of the camera, if it looks like something you get out of a magazine or something, not so nice. However this camera I think myself is very stylish looking.

There are no sharp edges on the camera, the whole thing is almost and oval/square shape which gives it that added stylishness. I think with the black colour, the rest of the camera is silver, so it works very well and just gives it that added, wow.

The LCD screen is 2.5inches and for me this is a great size, the screen goes well with the camera and the layout, mine however is now covered in finger smudges which it picks up very easily.

The camera is a brilliant size. I am able to slide it very easily into my jeans pocket with no damage to the camera and I'm still able to move around freely ect. It's also a good weight, however this could be a problem, as I seem to forget that I've got the camera around my neck, turn around to say hello to someone and of course the camera comes flying with me and nearly knocks them out. Not so good.

Rating: 10/10 (If your looking for a stylish, small and light weight camera this is for you, very nice looking)

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Shutter Lag
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One of the biggest problems about this camera is the shutter lag. It's way too long for my liking. If you need to take action shots with this camera, you have to be well prepared. Don't expect to be able to capture your children in their greatest moments with this camera, as soon as you see the image about to happen, turn on the camera, take the picture, it's come and gone, which is a great shame because this camera is brilliant besides this.

If your looking for a camera to just take random pictures of, maybe your and EBay addict or you like to take pictures of landscapes/flowers, mainly still images this is for you. I think to be a photographer you do have to have a great talent which I don't have, so I think if you can work your way around a camera and get passed all of the problems, then you'll love this camera.

Shutter Lag Rating: 3/10 (Way too slow, by the time everything's happened your camera isn't even ready to take the picture, you have to be ready before the action happens)

OVERALL EASE OF USE

Do I find the camera easy to use? Yes, that's the easy answer. I can easily go from taking a load of pictures, looking at them, maybe editing them on the camera and uploading them to the computer in quite a small space of time. This is what most people want.

The camera only has one big problem and that is the slow shutter, it takes just a bit too long, and it takes a bit of practise to work out how to get the pictures brilliant, but other than that, I think this camera is brilliant for even the technophobes of the world.

Ease Of Use Rating: 9/10 (Very easy to use, nothing too complicated in here if your just using the still portion of the camera)

OVERALL QUALITY OF PICTURES

I find that with still pictures, I seem to be able to take quality pictures around 97% of the time, however those 3% are due to either bad lighting, my incompetence or me having a case of the shakes and the camera doesn't always seem to deal with those very well.

I'll be attaching some pictures below so you can see for yourself what the quality is, but I think despite all of the problems that the camera might have, as long as you make sure you don't always rely on the camera, by that I mean, half of taking pictures, is you and the way you position yourself and the way you hold the camera. I know some people, I'm not naming any one here as I'll be severely hurt, think that the camera should be a miracle worker and even if your jumping up and down with the camera it should take magazine type photo quality. This camera doesn't take lightly to you jumping up and down, if you want a nice still picture I would recommend a tripod as they come out so much better.

I think the overall quality of the pictures is brilliant, make sure that you have time with the pictures is all I can say, by that I mean you will have to sit your children down and get them to sit still for more than a second, for this camera to even get a picture of them, it's not very quick so might not be best to capture their best moments.

Picture Quality Rating: 8/10 (Overall the quality is brilliant; however the shutter lag does ruin it sometimes)

OVERALL PREFORMANCE OF CAMERA

I'm gonna do this section in a list of questions as I think this is what I would ask if I was buying a new camera.

1- Does the camera take good pictures?: Yes the camera takes very good pictures, I think most of the time when the camera doesn't take brilliant pictures it's down to me being a bit incompetent and maybe shaking the camera when I really needed a steady hand.

2- Does is look nice?: Yes, like I said before, it's a very stylish camera; it's pretty cheap for a camera of this quality and doesn't look cheap at all.

3- How easy is it to take pictures? : Still shots are very easy to take, as are videos, however when your going to take pictures of people in motion, it does get a bit more complicated to take a very good shot. However for stills it's brilliant.

4- Is it a heavy camera?: No, in a way is a bit too light, you find yourself forgetting you have it on you. This is good in some ways as you don't have a big bulk of weight in your hands when taking pictures.

5- Does the camera always perform?: Truthfully most of the time, I went to a friends and had to deal with low light but we still wanted pictures, of course in hindsight I could have used the flash, but then it ruined the pictures and I can't even edit them so they look good. 90% of the time, it always performs and delivers.

6- How easy does it fit into your handbag?: To give it extra padding as I'm the klutziest person in the world I have a camera case for mine, which makes it a little bit more bulkier, however if I just had the camera on it's own, I think it'll slip into the smallest handbag as it's very small.

7- What rating would you give it out of 10?: The overall rating that it's come out with out of 160 is 126. For that I would give it around an 7/10 overall rating.

SHOULD YOU BUY THE CAMERA?

I think if you're looking for a camera that delivers but is still a reasonable price this camera is for you. I'm sure the price has gone down tremendously now, so it's even better for the price. I think this camera however, is more aimed at women; it just looks more of a women's camera. It's quite hard to describe what I mean, but I'm sure you'll hopefully see what I mean with the pictures.

Hoped you enjoyed the review.

Please rate, you've obviously read it (so you don't need to do that again) and please comment :D If you want to add to the last part, if there's any questions please ask and I'll include them. An interactive review if you will.

© Kirsty. xx

Summary: A brilliant camera overall, some problems, but other than that brill. x

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