Kodak Easyshare M420

Kodak’s Easyshare M420 is aimed at the person looking for a reasonably cheap and convenient, compact camera that will basically take care of business, allowing you to simply point and shoot. As Kodak’s founder George Eastman once said: “You press the button, we do the rest.” So, the Easyshare M420 is cheap, but is it cheerful …

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree.

£170 is not a cheap camera. I belive that ammount of lolly puts it into the mid-range home user level. A cheap camera would be more around the £70 or so mark.

[James Hughes 1]

Cheap camera?

£170 seems like it's mid-priced for a compact, given the number of decent (?reviews?) cameras available for less than £100, even less than £75.

[Bassey]

Greed with above

£70 bought me a Casio Exlim with 8.1mp, a case and a 2GB SD card. It's fast, the image stabilisation works a treat and 90% of the pictures it's produced so far have been 1st class - and that's in the hands of my (nearly) 60-year-old mother for whom I bought it as a birthday present. For £170 I'd expect the camera to take the memory card out, load it in the PC, copy the pics over, select the best one and print it for me (though I am a tight-wad).

[Arthur Coppock 1]

Meaningful measurements?

"Easyshare M420 has a 1/2.33-inch CCD"

1/2.33-inch? Great, been looking for one of that size for ages.

or to look at it another way 1/2.33in * 25.4 = 10.9mm which at least is understandable.

And do we really need to now the size of the body to sub-millimetre precision? And if we do what temperature were these measurements taken? - in case it gets bigger in a hot, sweaty palm.

[Anonymous Coward]

High ISO imagery

When you test a camera, you take an image across the range of ISO settings that the camera supports so as to demonstrate any image degradation.

Although this is valuable in allowing us to see the noise, it does not really show off the camera in its intended light (or lack of). Surely, the most common use of a v high ISO is to take pictures in the dark (or near dark) where a flash is either unsuitable or lacks the range.

How about taking some night time shots that demonstrate how dark an image is at low ISO and how increasing the ISO increases the picture brightness so that we can see the trade off of picture quality against noise.

And yes, I do know that higher ISOs also can be useful when taking "action" shots to get a faster shutter speed but I'd bet that they are most used in darker conditions.

[Patrick 14]

£170 cheap

I got myself a Sony A200 with 18-70mm and 12 months warranty from CEX and yes its secondhand but at least its a Decent DSLR.

Price £220

its £50 more but thats a better Camera. and yes No video modem but I can take picture that are good for that sort of cash LOL

[Dave Bell]

Optical quality?

Back in the days of film cameras, you could load Kodachrome 25 into a really cheap camera.

Modern lens design and manufacturing is far beyond what could be done twenty years ago, but the feel I get from the samples is not unlike that roll of Kodachrome. The lens performance doesn't match the potential of the sensor resolution.

[karakalWitchOfTheWest]

What is wrong with the charger system?

This is perfect! I always have an USB-cable laying around, but I can't find the chargers for my different Canons I have...

And the system is perfect for traveling. On my vacation I had my netbook with me and I charged my phone, my mp3 player and my navsat with a simple usb-cable. O would have charged my camera but I forgot the damned charger anywhere...