Kodak EasyShare V530

Conclusion
The Kodak EasyShare V530 aims to grab a share of the ultra slim market with its trendy colored housings, skinny 0.9-inch profile, and organized layout. The 5 megapixel V530 comes in red, silver, black, and pink – each to appeal to a slightly different audience. All of the cameras come with a green focus assist lamp on the front that proves to be quite annoying during movie recording. This compact model has a branded Schneider-Kreuznach 3x optical zoom lens that doesn’t quite live up to its name. The lens distorts the image in the corners of the frame and has only about five stops in its zoom range of 36-108 mm (equivalent).

The buttons on this Kodak EasyShare look organized, but are deceivingly difficult to handle. The positioning is not ergonomically pleasing so users’ hands are forced into strange poses to change settings. Changing settings shouldn’t be an overly frequent occurrence though because the Kodak EasyShare V530 is very automatically oriented. It has an auto mode, 20 scene modes and a movie mode. The breadth of the scene modes is extensive; the modes cover everything from Text and Children to the more common Portrait and Landscape.

The movie mode is pretty impressive for such a small digital camera. It shoots video at both 640 x 480 and 320 x 240 pixels and does so at a smooth 30 frame-per-second rate. The optical zoom can be used while recording, although it does produce some noise. The Kodak V530 has a digital image stabilization system that works surprisingly well during movie recording.

There are some settings that can be manually adjusted, but users can choose to completely ignore these if they wish. Kodak tries to streamline the shooting and sharing process by including in-camera color modes, cropping and even a sharpness adjustment – and by also including a Kodak EasyShare Photo Frame Dock 2 with the camera. The dock charges the V530’s lithium-ion battery while allowing users to play slide shows and transfer images to printers or computers.

The Kodak EasyShare V530 was released at a retail price of $349 and then modified to a more affordable $299 price tag. The V530 is cheaper than most of its other competitors and has very similar features: 5 megapixels, a skinny body that can fit in a pocket, and automatic functionality. So while this camera can be tough to handle and has quirks like the eerie green light, it is still a bargain.