Bought my mother in law a Kodak EasyShare CX7220 digital camera for christmas. It was reduced by £50 because it is an oldish 2M pixel model coming to the end of it's life. I found it interesting to compare it with my 2 year old Nikon Coolpix 2500 which is also 2M pixel. Here is a bullet point review:
Kodak pros:
- Kodak easier to use: I didn't need manual
- Starts up quickly and ready to fire compared to Nikon which takes annoyingly long (damn baby stops smiling by time it's booted).
- Kodak uses AA batteries and can take NiMH's. Compare to Nokon with proprietary (aka expensive) NiMH which goes flat 1/2 way through a day out.
- Kodak has a cool orientation sensor: take photo in portrait orientation and it displays it and outputs it as 1200x1600, instead of 1600x1200 landscape which saves a rotation operation when copied to computer.
- Kodak takes videos with sound.
- As you switch modes the screen explains what the mode is for
Nikon pros:
- Side-by-side comparison of the same scene (baby, what else) the Nikon picture looks a lot better. The kodak picture seems noisy: on the Nikon baby's skin is smooth while on the Kodaks the skin seems pixellated, even though both photos are 1200x1600. To me it was hands down to the Nikon. (I won't post the pictures as they are big files and I'm not sure anyone cares enough to download them).
- The Nikon had better pictures and the jpeg it generated was 1.44Mb compared to 1.92 Mb for the Kodak. Maybe the camera finds all that pixel noise harder to compress? As well as making the pictures look worse, it increases the file size by 33% (i.e. your memory card holds 3/4 the photos of the Nikon).
Conclusion: Kodak is easy to use and Mum-in-law is delighted with it. I'm not sure I'd buy a Kodak.
Peter's Moblog
