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Kodak V570 Twin Lens Ultra Compact Digital CameraKodak EasyShare V570 digital camera Review
| Design | | We have to say when it comes to looks the Kodak EasyShare V570 is the Naomi Campbell of the camera world – stunning to look at in a tiny little body. The slender black body with its chrome trimmings only measures a sleek 4 inch by 2 inch by 0.8 inch and only weights a dinky five ounces. You’ll notice at the front when you open the silver cover there are two lenses rather than the conventional one, and it’s these two lenses that provide the ultra wide angles and telephoto power when shooting. So you have one lens that has a 3x zoom while the other has a 4x digital zoom. Turn the V570 around and Kodak has provided a 2.5 inch CCD with 230,000 pixels providing sharp, clear images for easy viewing and on either side there’s buttons. On the right is the circular zoom button which is difficult to use while holding the camera (it’s in an awkward position) and joystick which is used for shift from macro to normal focus and for the exposure. To the left of the CCD five buttons for the menu, reviewing pictures and deleting them, turning on the flash and sharing your photos. Then at the top, not so easy to use are the other buttons including the power on button and to the left are the various modes on the camera: favorite photos, movie recording, and still recording. And finally on the side you’ll find the slot for the SD card and also the AV input, both discretely hidden by a silver panel. | | Setup/Installation | | There’s nothing to it. Charge up, switch on, wait for two seconds for things to warm up and you’re ready to shoot. | | Features | | There’s plenty to keep you happy on the features front. To start with there’s 21 scene modes to select from including one especifically for flowers and another for when you’re in a museum and might not want your flash to go off and a Custom option that saves your settings for you. From the two lenses, one provides F2.8 with a fixed focal length of 3.8mm which is equivalent to 23mm and the standard lens below has a maximum aperture of F3.9 – F4.4 with a focal length of 6.4mm – 19.2mm (equivalent to 39 - 117 mm) and neither of these extend out of the camera. We love the panorama feature which allows you to take pictures and line them up on your CCD and then automatically assembles the photos together into one aligned and perfectly exposed image. On full auto mode the camera selects the ISO between 64 – 160 while in the limited manual function you can shoot up to ISO 800 with 1.8 megapixel resolution. The VGA movie mode which shoots at 30fps has a built-in image stabilizer and includes a microphone so you get sound too. There’s a built-in flash that doesn’t work too well at long distances. There’s no manual focus but you can play around with the autofocus system they’ve provided such as the continuous autofocus mode which keeps focusing as you move the camera round. Thanks to the micro mode you can focus as close as 5cm. The V570 has 32MB of built-in memory but does have room for a larger memory card should you want one. And it all runs on a KLIC-7001 lithium-ion battery which can be charged up on Kodak’s Photo Frame Dock 2. | | Performance | | Starting up the camera is pretty good. It takes just under two seconds for the camera to warm up before you can start taking pictures. The LCD like many of Kodak’s cameras is rather good and lights up or dims down depending on the surrounding light and does a good job of keeping up with the action shots. The V570 has a standard burst mode taking four shots in a row at 2 frames/second and Shot-to-shot speeds were excellent too. The focus speed was very good on the V570 even when using the telephoto mode. However the flash was a bit disappointing not really lighting up the subject at all. Photo quality on the EasyShare V570 was alright and typical of an ultra compact camera with images well exposed and decent colours, whoever we did suffer from redeye on some shots. | | What's In The Box? | | 5 Megapixel Kodak EasyShare V570 camera, KLIC-7001 lithium-ion rechargeable battery , AC adapter / battery charger, Photo Frame 2 camera dock, Camera dock insert, Cloth camera case, Wrist strap, USB cable, A/V cable, CD-ROM featuring Kodak EasyShare software, camera manual. | | Overall Opinion | | The EasyShare V570 isn’t going to set the world alight but it’s not a bad little camera for its size. It looks the business and the two lenses are a bit of a novelty touch which works well. If you’re looking for a sexy looking point-and-shoot camera that doesn’t need a lot of thinking through when using it and you’re not too fussed about top quality images then this isn’t a bad buy – for holidays and snaps of the kids it’s an alright buy. |
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Pros
+ Compact camera
+ Ultrawide lens
+ Several scene modes
+ In built panorama stitching
+ Good video facilities
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Cons
- Some clumsy controls
- limited manual control
- Average image quality
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Battery Life 6/10
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Picture Quality 6/10
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Setup Simplicity 7/10
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Build Quality 7/10
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Ease of Use 7/10
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Overall Rating
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By Babita Wakelin
1/9/2006
at 2:51:18pm
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