Kodak EasyShare C663

Auto Mode
Turning the mode dial to Auto put the camera into the fully automatic mode, where most of the controls are set by the camera itself. However, you can still go into menus and manually set a number of settings, such as exposure compensation and flash mode.

Movie Mode
Switching to video mode records movies to the SD card at a resolution of 640 x 480 or 320 x 240, both at 24 frames per second. In our limited testing, we found the quality of the movies to be acceptable, with reasonably smooth movement and decent color. The mono sound is also acceptable, but it won’t pick up distant sounds. It isn’t going to replace a camcorder, though. You can use the optical zoom while recording video, but not the digital zoom. This is quite impressive, especially on a point-and-shoot, though use of optical zoom in video mode seems to be an emerging trend in 2006 digital cameras.

Drive / Burst Mode
The C663 is capable of capturing around 2 frames per second. It actually has two burst modes: first burst takes 4 images after the shutter is pressed and saves them to memory, while last burst records only the last 4 images out of up to 30 (for about 15 seconds of shooting). This is a nice idea: you could press the shutter when you know something is going to happen (such as a golf swing or airplane taking off), but only keep the last 4 images. You can’t, however, change the speed of the capture: it’s limited to 2 frames a second. But changing the speed of capture is only an option usually offered on more fully featured digital SLR cameras, so it’s omission is not a surprise.

Playback Mode
You can enter playback mode by pressing the review button on the back of the camera. In playback mode, you are given options to zoom in on an image (up to 8x), delete an image, move it to an album or protect it from deletion. Images can be viewed singly or in thumbnail groups of up to 9. The share button also allows you to flag images for printing, emailing or to be added to the favorites list. The latter allows you to set a group of images to be displayed when you go to the favorites setting on the mode dial: a nice touch if there are any adorable images of your kids or pets that you just can’t be without. Photos can also be shown in a slide show, copied from SD card to memory or vice versa, and cropped. The C663 has a live histogram option as well; the histogram can be seen in playback mode as well as in a live view.

Custom Image Presets
13 scene modes are also available by setting the mode dial to Scn. These are mostly self-explanatory: Portrait, Sport, Children, Party, Beach, Snow, Fireworks, Flower, Self-portrait, Backlight, Night Portrait, Manner/Museum (which disables the sound and flash) and Text. Some of these modes (such as fireworks) completely disable the flash, which is a good idea; you’d hate to accidentally use the flash at a firework display and blind everyone else who is watching.

The two most common scene modes are available as separate settings on the mode dial itself. The C663 offers a landscape mode here (which sets the focus to infinity) and a close-up mode (which sets the focus to macro and disables the flash unless it is absolutely necessary).