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Viewfinder
The Kodak V-series digital cameras don’t have optical viewfinders on them. They strive to be tiny cameras, and leave out unnecessary components in doing so. Rather than a traditional optical viewfinder, the V705 uses its LCD screen to provide a live view. The screen is large enough and has great resolution, but its actual image is disappointing. The live view differs greatly from the actual recorded frame; the coverage is good from edge to edge, but the colors and focus look different. The live view isn’t as sharp and the colors often look very different from reality. When the picture is taken and the recorded image is reviewed, the colors look closer to reality and most of the time the focus is much sharper than what was seen in the live view. Thus, it is hard to judge if the picture will actually look good – which makes it a very poor viewfinder.
LCD Screen
The 2.5-inch LCD screen on the Kodak V705 has 230,000 pixels, making a nice smooth view. There are certainly issues with the live view, described above, but the LCD makes a great viewing device in the playback mode. Images can be seen from almost any angle; it does better side to side, but is decent held above or below eye-level too. Playback is enhanced with automatic picture rotation too. In the setup menu, users can switch the LCD’s brightness from Power Save to High Power. The latter option sucks the battery dry faster, but is much better for viewing outdoors. The battery life can be conserved somewhat by dimming the LCD screen when not in use; this can be done in the setup menu. Users can choose to have the screen dim from 10-30 seconds after the last button is pushed on the camera. The display information can be changed to show file info, grid lines, and histograms by pushing the top of the multi-selector. Overall, the V705’s LCD screen is much more impressive as a playback device than as a viewfinder.
Flash
The Kodak EasyShare V705 has a very thin rectangular flash unit located in the top right corner of the front. This positioning isn’t very smart. The ideal flash would be located above the lens, where coverage would be sure to be even, and it’d be out of the way of fingers. Indeed, many test shots had to be retaken because the left hand’s fingers accidentally wandered in the way. There are other problems besides the positioning too: many shots had red eyes in them, despite all the red-eye reduction technology crammed into this tiny camera. Here are the flash modes: Auto, Off, Fill, and Auto with Red-Eye Reduction. There is no mode to ensure that the red-eye reduction pre-flash will fire; the only physical red-eye reduction mode only works automatically when the camera thinks it needs it. Kodak also included digital red-eye reduction technology, but it doesn’t appear to do much either. The flash extends from 2.6-10.2 ft when using the 23mm focal length and the ISO 200 setting. With the 3x lens, the flash is only effective from 2-7.2 ft at its 39mm focal length and 2-6.6 ft at the 117mm focal length. The skinny flash doesn’t reach very far, so portraits in need of a flash will have to be shot close to the camera. This will make shooting large group portraits with the flash nearly impossible.
Zoom Lens
Kodak came out with its first dual lens digital camera early in 2006, and the series now has three cameras with the Retina technology. The V705 is the latest edition, but it has the same lenses that were included on the first camera to introduce the system. The two lenses are stacked atop each other, with the ultra-wide 23mm fixed focal length lens at the top. It has a fixed aperture of f/2.8 and is about the size of a pen tip. The bottom lens is a 3x optical zoom measuring 39-117mm with maximum apertures of f/3.9-4.4. Both lenses are branded Schneider-Kreuznach C-Variogon glass. Kodak’s specs claim this to be a 5x optical zoom range system, which is a bit misleading. Sure, a range from 23-117mm would be 5x, but there is a bit gap between 23mm and 39mm. And in the end, the longest focal length is still 117mm – hardly enough to be considered a long-zoom lens.
When zooming through with the tiny circular control on the back of the camera, there is a huge jump that takes some getting used to. There are only six focal length “stops” available within the 5x zoom range, which is very unfortunate. The zoom control is so insensitive that it can’t fine-tune a good crop of subjects. The zoom lenses are functional in the movie mode, which is nice until users see the big chunk of the zoom range missing. The wide lens keeps pictures bright and sharp, but using the zoom lens tended to darken pictures and dampen the focus a bit too. The wide lens showed distortion, which is helped somewhat by the Distortion Compensation option that can be activated in the setup menu.
Overall, the Kodak Retina dual lens system is very unique and the concept is cool, but the lenses themselves aren’t very high quality. Of note in this section is the 4x digital zoom that can be turned on and off in the setup menu; it should be avoided at all costs so the already poor image quality doesn’t suffer even more.
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