Kodak EasyShare Z915

Design & Appearance

The Kodak EasyShare Z915 has a simple design, with a very lightly speckled black finish that's not too slick. It's not going to win any awards for looks, but it's not an ugly camera by any means.

Size & Handling

Although not as small as some competitors in the compact ultrazoom space, the Kodak EasyShare Z915 is significantly smaller than most ultrazoom cameras. It will certainly fit easily into a jacket pocket, although you might have a bit more trouble trying to fit it into a pants pocket. The larger size does have one major bonus in that there's more to hold onto when gripping the camera. Kodak has taken advantage of this to build a nice grip into the left side of the camera, with a textured finish on the back that lets you hold it one-handed with confidence.

It's impressive how small the Z915 is given the 10x optical zoom.

Menu

The Z915 menu system is very simple and straightforward. First of all, unlike many other cameras, there's only one menu system to learn and navigate. You access this by pressing the menu button, of course, and when activated you'll see two tabs to navigate. The first tab has all of the options available for your current shooting or playback mode. The second has setup options like time and date. Pressing up/down on the 4-way controller will move you to the next or previous option while left/right will allow you to adjust the option. Also simplifying the menu is that Kodak doesn't seem to use any sub-menus, so the interface is very consistent.

There's only one menu interface on the Z915.

Ease of Use

Kodak's cameras are definitely targeted at those who don't want to spend all their time learning how the camera works. The interface is simple and they've avoided complications like multiple menu interfaces. They've also avoided buttons with dual functions, for example the 4-way controller on the Z915 doesn't activate any functions when you press in a direction while in shooting mode. Instead, the functions you usually find on a 4-way are available using dedicated buttons on top of the camera. This does makes camera control more straightforward, but it also means those functions aren't as close to hand. The screen interface is also straightforward. For example when in manual mode you see very clear indicators at the bottom of the screen for exposure controls and these are easily navigated and adjusted using the 4-way controller. We're sure that novice users will appreciate the simplicity, but more advanced users may miss the more complicated and slightly more efficient control schemes found on other cameras.