The Kodak EasyShare Z1275 looks like your typical point and shoot digital camera. It was my misfortune to have to use it in place of my usual "prosumer" level full-sized camera for production at work yesterday. I don't understand why anyone would mass-produce a camera that requires a protracted FIGHT with the photographer, just to get a half-decent shot. It's a good thing I know my way around Photoshop because HALF might be as close to a good picture as you get with this thing.
This thing is too small for a man's hands. I have size 8 mitts, and I have to hold this thing like I am pretending to be Princess Dainty at a tea party. A two-handed GRIP puts my finger in front of the flash.
Speaking of which, the flash output apparently is not properly self-compensating. Too dim or too bright is very common
AND it frikken LOVES using the flash. If you don't tell it not to, it's flashing.
The flash is also too close to the lens, causing funky reflections and shadows.
The controls are apparently an afterthought. If my fingers were any bigger, the controls would be completely useless. As it is, about 10% of the time the too-small too-close wrong button is pressed.
The Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard, SERIOUSLY? My old camera has all the pretentiousness of a USB memory stick when it comes to the interface with my computer. I have to click a half-dozen different buttons to offload my pictures, instead of drag and drop into Photoshop. The workaround is to close the Wizard and open Explorer, drag and drop to a folder on the PC, THEN drag & drop to Photoshop. Fail.
The autofocus. Speaking of Fail. [deleted]. This thing couldn't take a focused shot of a black box in a white room to save its life.
The manual focus. See "The autofocus," above. The screen isn't sharp enough to not have a magnified "assist" feature . . . which it doesn't.
The manual controls. See "The autofocus," above. Instead of a knob for every one or two features an actual photographer (as opposed to a teenybopper at a party) would use, we have a 4-way selection rocker with a select button.
The screen is a decent size, at least.
What's with the preview mode? If I want to see the picture sideways, I can turn my head, the camera, or both. The camera picks when it will show the image sideways on-screen, resulting in random turnings of head and camera anyway. This behavior, at least, can be turned off.
Slow. Slow as molasses saving, zooming in, previewing, focusing.
If you're not using the flash, you will have to fiddle with manual controls, period. It's not smart enough to compensate for not having the flash turned on.
When a photo is composed, and looks well-exposed on screen, you take the shot. Then the review image turns out to be over- or under-exposed. The ONLY indication you have of this is in the manual control mode, by way of the the (unlabeled) EV number or a (uselessly-small) histogram (if you turn the histogram on).
Why, if the image captured was clear and focused, is the review image grainy?
Even on that 5% chance that an image is captured in focus, it is not very crisp. Muddy is too strong a word, but it is approaching the right one.
YMMV. I work in a place where the lights are bright, but not so bright you have to squint. Outdoor shots with this camera may be somewhat less terrible, I didn't try it. If you need a kick-around camera for basic documentation or quick web presentations, this one is STILL barely a decent camera. For serious or production work, keep shopping. I had a quick peek arount the 'net, and found that my low opinion of this camera is shared by people who actually tested it. Websites claiming to have "reviews" but who didn't actually test it, tend to rate it much more highly.
Fortunately for me, the only thing that died altogether on my production camera was the USB port. I found that I can curse my way through file transfer with the Kodak Z1275, using it as an SD memory card reader, until I can come up with a proper SD card reader or another camera.
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Update: WM won a replacement camera for me on eBay last night, of the same type as my old one. Thank you Jesus!
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