Great first choice (Kodak DC 215)

Member Name: buchanan17

Product:	Kodak DC 215
Date:	02/10/00 (114 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, good value

Disadvantages: Limited storage, batteries run down quickly, mains charger £40+ extra

If quality were judged by weight, this would be tops. It feels so reassuringly solid, backing up its excellent brand name.

It is also very eay to use - just point and shoot, near enough. It has a manual zoom of 2X to back up the megapixel display. Most pictures therefore are easy to tyak and produce reasonable quality.

If you are going to print out photos, try to make the image as large as possible in the viewfinder - if you are going to crop before printing you are losing resolution which wil show. In general too, i don't usually print out on much more than 6" x 4" photo paper where pixellation can barely be seen.

the camera does has some drawbacks which are well documented in reviews - the on board card only takes 12 top resolution pictures (4Mb), and the batteries run down quickly if the LCD screen is used much, and fairly quickly anyway - and for the basic £210 you don;t get a mains adapter which is a pricely £40 extra.

Don't take it far from home - and turn it off whenever possible - and delete pictures wholesale through the PC based controller - much quicker.

The camera comes with Adobe Photoshop 3.1 an adequate but not brilliant program.

As for picture quality - it is good enough for me, but may be not for the discerning. It is however a very good introduction to digital photography.

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Update 10/00:
+++++++++++++++
A computer magazine has pointed out a couple of things this month (Computer Buyer Nov00)

1) The 215 is fixed focus. It actually does remarkably well considering IMHO
2) There is evidnce of compression techniques on pictures - I noticed difficulty on large flat grey areas - I had assumed that this was the printer that was struggling - most likely now it was the camera at fault.

Update 12/00
+++++++++++++

I've been using this camera a lot to put pictures onto Ebay auct
ions.

The fixed focus is only a small problme - even close up pictures come out remarkably clear. The Adobe Photoshop 3.1 packaged with it is a little limited mainly in formats supported.

I have also bought a mains adaptor from buy.com for less than £30 (65% of list). It is expensive partly because it is global and has four different plugs into which the transformer fits. A waste as most people can cope with international mains adaptors - just an excuse to charge loads. But the adaptor is essential to save money in the long term as the camera eats batteries, and when taking close up pictures, the viwfinder is too offset and you have to use the LCD screen to frame the picture

Summary: