First up, let me get one thing clear; if you're after a high-performance digital camera, you'll be sorely disappointed with this offering from Kodak. But what do you really expect for £100? What you get for your money is a brilliant little camera that's perfectly suited for taking snapshots for posting on web pages or emailing to people. The EZ200 is one of the growing breed of "cheap and cheerful" digital cameras, and design-wise it's far closer to a souped-up webcam than a stripped down digital camera. So if you're after a digital camera to replace your expensive "proper" camera and take decent pictures, this is definitely not for you.
Let's talk specs. The maximum resolution you can get is 640x480 pixels. Unless you like your pictures to be less than an inch square, this is nothing like enough to print
out photo-quality pictures. However, it's just right for web purposes; 640x480 comes out at roughly half screen size for people using a high-resolution monitor, and nearly fills the screen at lower resolution. While it is perfectly possible to get passable results printing out at 4"x5" at this resolution, you can clearly see pixels all over the place, even with fairly heavy-duty phot enhancing software. There is also a ten-second self-timer for this resolution only.
The camera can also take pictures at 320x240, which approximately doubles the number of pictures you can fit on the memory. At this resolution, you can give up all hopes of being able to get decent printed results, but it's still more than enough for web purposes; for in-line images, this size is just right. There is also a handy "burst fire" mode which allows you to take 5 320x240 pictures in the space of a second; perfect for action shots, and handy if you want to make animated GIFs out of them.
Finally, there is the "silent movie" function; you can use the camera to record up to 6 10-second silent film clips, which can then be saved on your computer in AVI format. While it may not sound liek too much, you'd be surprised at how much you can fit into ten seconds. The camera can also be used as a standard web-cam for videoconferencing and the like.
Storage wise, the camera fares surprisingly well. It has 4MB of internal memory with no provison for Flash cards or the like. You can supposedly fit up to 64 high-res pictures, or 128 low-res ones, in memory, but in practise you can often fit far more on there than that. While testing the camera out, I managed to fit over 100 high-res pictures in memory and still have space left over; obviously, this will vary depending on the actual nature of your pictures (pictures with a lot of different colours and tones take up more memory than fairly plain ones) but you can still fit more than enough pictures in memory. Of course, since there's no removable memory, it's absolutely useless for protracted journeys away from your computer, but that's a minor point.
The camera itself is dead easy to use; installation is a simple matter of running the supplied installation CD and plugging the camera in. It's a USB device, so you don't even need to restart your computer. The supplied USB cable is 3 metres long, which gives you plenty of leeway when the unit's connected to your computer. It's powered through the USB port when it's attached to the computer, and by 4 AAA batteries when it's out and about. It's very small, about the size of a small APS camera (3.6x1.4x2.7 inches) and only weighs 4.7oz with the batteries in. There are only 3 buttons on the camera itself; power on/off, mode select and shutter, which means it's pretty simple to use. And it comes provideed with a wrist-strap and a miniature stand for mounting it atop your computer.
Overall, the performance is well above what you might expect for such a cheap camera. It's small, light, easy to use, can take loads of pictures at once, and has a couple of interesting features. Resolution is limited and there's no removable memory, but these are minor points to say the least, and not really features you can honestly expect a camera of this price to have. All in all, if you just want a low-end digital camera for taking snapshots to email to people and to decide if you really want to buy a "proper" digital camera or not, you can't go far wrong with this one.
This product has not yet been reviewed.
20.02.2002 19:31
fab op, kate
07.03.2001 01:16
Good opinion. It was a toss-up between this and the Jenoptic JD350 for me and like an idiot I went for the Jenoptic. (read my opinion it's not very flattering) Is there any chance you could upload some pics to a website and include a link in your op so I could have a look at the quality?
05.02.2001 21:04
VG review, might be tempted to buy one for web design use. Cheers