Digital Trends

Kodak EasyShare One October 31st, 2005 | by David Elrich

As mentioned earlier, the Kodak EasyShare One doesn’t start up in a flash; you’re good to go in about six seconds, depending how fully charged the battery. Picture quality is decent enough, as is the case with most Kodak cameras. And remember this is a 4MP camera (2304 x 1728 pixels) hardly the horsepower of the new 10.3-megapixel Sony DSC-R1.Still with a 4MP file you can turn out decent 8.5x11 prints without too much trouble. For some reason, Kodak doesn’t let you change compression settings—there’s only 4MP down to 1MP with no basic, fine or superfine options. There’s no getting away from the fact this $599 model is a limited point-and-shoot camera. I did all my shooting at 4MP and there definitely was some lag time as the camera saved files to the card. Danica Patrick it’s not. 

Holding the camera is somewhat awkward since you don’t cradle it but steady it with your thumbs and index fingers. However, this is the case for all thin digicams with large LCD screens. Image stabilization would be a welcome feature as would an AF Assist lamp for taking shots in low light. Why manufacturers leave off such important features baffles me but I’m not the big bucks product guy so what do I know? On the very positive side of the ledger is the 3-inch touch screen LCD. It’s a beauty with a wide range of adjustments for use in bright or dim light. It’s definitely one of highlights of this camera. The 3-inch LCD is very cool but boy does it swallow the juice and even warms up the camera body. That’s why Kodak supplies two batteries, the only camera I’ve encountered that does this. Be warned and carry the charged spare with you.

I was pleased with most of the results, especially outdoors. Colors were rich and accurate something better Kodak digicams are known for. Digital noise didn’t really become a pain until ISO 200 and 400 settings and then only for the 8.5x11 blowups. But you can really see the falloff in quality between 200 to 400, even outdoors. I made the prints straight from the SD card without any adjustments with editing software. And the EasyShare One definitely needed the AF Assist lamp. Remember this is basically a point-and-shoot camera without the gee-gaws that keep photo tweaks spinning dials for hours on end. Videos were decent but the major drawback was the noise picked up when you used the zoom lens. But you’re not spending 500-plus dollars for a 4MP point-and-shoot camera. It’s the Wi-Fi capability, storage and the LCD screen.  

The Kodak folks have made wireless relatively painless—once you’ve hooked up your own network or stepped into a T-Mobile hot spot. My wireless network has a Buffalo AirStation WBR-G54 router. In order to send images to my Sony PCG-TR3 laptop, I had to load the supplied Kodak EasyShare software and use a USB cable to sync the camera to the software on the laptop. Once this was done, sending images between devices was relatively easy and fast. The EasyShare One is supplied with a Wi-Fi card that slides into the top of the camera near the shutter button. When not in use, it’s flush to the body. When you want it to work, you put the camera in the View setting and pop up the card. It then searches for an available network. In this case it was Buffalo. Then with a few taps of the stylus my photos were soon on my laptop. This was very cool. You can also beam images directly to a compatible printer but you need another card ($99 list) to make it happen.

The EasyShare One also lets you send images to the Internet so your friends can check out what you’ve just shot. Working in a similar fashion, you access the local network then send images to the EasyShare Gallery. It’s not an instantaneous process but it’s pretty quick. When your friends check their email, they’re invited to see the shots at the Gallery site where a login is required. Also cool is the fact you can access all your images and then show them on the screen. It’s also easy to save images for later playback. You can even watch a slideshow with nifty fades between shots. 

Image Courtesy of Kodak