Digital Trends

Kodak V610 April 27th, 2006 | by David Elrich

Performance

As noted in the introduction, the V610 is a dual lens camera. When you power up, the lens cover quickly slides back to reveal a pair of Schneider Kreuznach C-Variogon lenses. Since the lens barrel doesn't have to extend, it's ready to go in less than two seconds. Although the lenses traverse 38-380mm, there's a hiccough as you move from wide to telephoto. Not to obsess on this, I wonder if anyone will notice or care about it? Anyway, I did. Remember, dealing with this “skip” gets you a very flat and convenient-to-carry digicam. Vacationers will love it for this fact alone but men and women do not live on zoom alone.

Setting up the camera barely takes a brain cell. A quick start guides gets you going and then the onscreen menus take care of the rest. The menus and prompts are very logical but with others learning from Kodak's example (such as HP), they don't stand out like they used to. I used the camera in Auto, then the various scene modes and the few manual adjustments available. As is the case with most Kodak cameras, there are no compression options—you just pick the megapixel setting (between 6 and 3). Note: anyone who wants to fiddle with aperture settings and f/stops should look elsewhere. There are four white balance settings including “open shade,” ISO can be adjusted between 64-800, there are three sharpness settings, and you can take long exposures ranging between .5-8 seconds—hardly a Canon EOS 5D  but the target audiences are very, very different.

Since the V610 is so thin, you hold it at the edges, opening you to blurry images due to shaky hands. Kodak, like other companies, has upped the ISO to reduce the shake. In Auto it ranges between 64-400. They also added noise reduction circuitry to cut back on that annoying issue. With this combo—called an Anti-Blur System with Advanced Reduction--I found grabbing images in low light and extreme telephotos to be pretty clean but there is noticeable noise. It's definitely not optical image stabilization as found on the bulkier Panasonic DMC-TZ1 ($349) with its true 10x optical zoom but it did a decent job.

One of the highlight features of the dual lens V570 is in-camera panorama stitching. The V610 has it too. You simply put the camera in one of the panorama modes via the Scene options and fire away. A shaded edge of the previous image stays on the LCD screen so you can match them more easily. It's here the limitations of the LCD really show themselves. I found myself squinting hard to line the edges up when shooting in bright sunshine, even after adjusting brightness levels. It was frustrating. Once the shots are taken, the camera automatically stitches the 3.1MP images together.

Image Courtesy of Kodak