Kodak EasyShare Z712 IS First Impressions Review

At PMA 2007 in Las Vegas, Kodak unveiled their latest digital camera, the EasyShare Z712 IS, a lightweight, 7.1-megapixel, 12x optical zoom camera with Optical Image Stabilization and High ISO mode. Available in April 2007 and retailing at $299, this camera is cheaper than many in the high-zoom camera segment. It’s also competitive with some of the higher-end compact cameras. According to Kodak’s marketing materials, Kodak is responding to market trends that claim 70 percent of digital cameras last year were second-time buyers and 70 percent were also women. So will this lightweight digital camera appeal to more informed women camera buyers and translate into increased sales for Kodak? That remains to be seen, but in the meantime, we’ll take a sneak peak at the camera to see how it performs on the Convention Center floor.

Note: The model we evaluated at PMA is a preproduction unit, so not all the features were available to be evaluated. We’ll reserve final judgment until we get a finished unit back to our lab.

Performance Expectations
The name Schneider on the lens boded well for the camera’s optics. Kodak states that this camera has the fastest click-to-capture speed (aka, shutter lag)—0.26 seconds—of any camera in its class. That remains to be tested in the model’s final version. However, we can report that the capture speed in the floor model we tested seemed relatively quick but it was not 1/4 second. Startup time was respectable, about 1-2 seconds, and write speeds seemed very slow, at least to internal memory. Again, this is a preproduction model so these times may not reflect the final model's performance.