Kodak EasyShare M530
Digital Cameras have become one of the essentials for kids going off to college. If you don’t have one yourself, chances are one of your friends does. How else are you supposed to tell all your friends about everything you’re doing? However if no one you know has a camera and you’re looking for a good camera on a college student budget, the Kodak M530, despite its shortcomings, will end up getting the job done and recoding all your late night escapades.
The M530’s design is expressive, yet subtle. The body of the camera comes in several different colors and is made up of plastic and aluminum. The surface provides a good surface to grip when you’re using the camera. The power, flash type, video/camera mode, and capture buttons are all located on the top of the camera, level with the surface. While this kept the camera looking sleek, it did take a while to be able to press specific buttons by feel alone. The worst case scenario with this was when I would press the power button instead of the flash or video mode button causing the camera to shut down.
On the back of the camera you’ll see the Kodak’s 2.7 inch viewing screen along with a few buttons for the trash, menu, info, and playback. You’ll also see the zoom in/out button in the top right corner and navigation arrows below that. Using these buttons is easy and they are relatively self explanatory after experimenting for a minute or two.
Although the camera is 12 Mega Pixels and its pictures came out clear, it only has 3x optical zoom which was a little upsetting. This caused problems in distance shots and if you tried to use the digital zoom, the picture quickly got pixilated. There are other similarly priced cameras that have 5x-7x zoom which would be much more useful. While 3x may be suitable for a night out when you are taking pictures of friends close up, if you tried to use it for documenting a trip or vacation it wouldn’t be long before you became frustrated with the 3x zoom.
The feature on the Kodak that was impressive was the facial recognition and tagging. Kodak makes it easy to tag your friends manually and it also recognizes faces and can tag their names automatically. Then when you use the Kodak’s Easy Share program on your computer, you can easily upload pictures from your camera to Facebook, YouTube, or Flickr. You can also rate pictures based on a 5 star system, similar to the way you rate your music in iTunes. The software worked relatively well, but could become sluggish at times during editing.
Even though the Kodak was able to keep up with normal use, the 3x zoom remained a big letdown. While it is somewhat common in this price range for the camera to have that zoom range, with a little comparison shopping, you can find other cameras for the same price that are much better in this category yet still have most of the features of the Kodak.