Kodak EasyShare-One

 

The Kodak EasyShare-one’s 3-inch LCD screen acts as the viewfinder as well. While the large screen does put a drain on the battery, with a bright 230,000 pixel display, an optical viewfinder would just consume space.  

 

Obviously, one of the strongest features on the EasyShare-one is its 3-inch LCD screen. It folds out from the camera body, rotates, and can fold back in with the monitor facing in or out. Whenever the screen is flipped outward, the digital camera turns on. The view on the screen is always right-side up even when flipping thanks to Kodak’s auto rotate function. The LCD is a touch screen, so it is responsive to fingers or the included stylus. Some of the arrows in the screen’s menus are smaller than fingers though and difficult to pinpoint with the stylus, so the multi-selector on the camera body is still useful. When the camera is first turned on, it will prompt users to use the stylus to touch the screen in certain points; this calibrates the screen and can be done at any time through the setup menu. The view on the screen is beautiful, whether it’s being used as a viewfinder or for playback. 230,000 pixels give this screen enough resolution for smooth images with a lot of definition.

Shooting information can be obtained using the Info button on the side of the screen; date and time, flash mode, exposure compensation, and the number of images that can be taken are just some of the information available on the screen. If the screen is not touched or the buttons are not pressed after ten seconds, the LCD screen will darken a bit until the EasyShare-one is touched. The duration of the backlight on the screen can be altered in the Device section of the setup menu; the screen can stay bright for 10, 20, 30, or 60 seconds. The actual monitor that houses the 3-inch touch screen gets quite warm. It’s not hot enough to burn your hands or fry eggs, but it could certainly melt chocolate into sauce. The screen could double as a hand-warmer in the wintertime; unfortunately, it will warm your hands in the summer too and is likely something Kodak will want to work on prior to the release of the next version.

 

The Kodak EasyShare-one has a built-in flash similar to many compact cameras. It has only a few flash modes: Auto, Red-Eye Reduction, Fill, and Off. These modes are selected by pushing the square silver button with the flash icon engraved into it atop the camera. The Red-Eye Reduction mode has a "pre-flash" that can be turned on or off. When it is off, the camera supposedly automatically corrects the red-eye (although it did not successfully do so in my tests). When the pre-flash is on, the flash fires twice. The mode is not actually prohibitive to red eyes. Luckily, there is a red-eye reduction function button on the Kodak Printer Dock Series 3 and a red-eye fix in the Kodak EasyShare Software.

 

When the lens is at its widest focal length, the flash can reach from 2-10.5 feet. At the lens’ most telephoto setting, the flash only reaches 2-7.5 feet. These figures are average, as some compact models reach only to 8 feet and others reach as far as 22 feet. The narrow flash unit causes hard shadows, so try to get your subjects away from walls or places that may intensify this effect.

 

Kodak uses a Schneider-Kreuznach C-Variogon 3x optical zoom lens that is effective in both still and video imaging. The zoom toggle is a bit sticky; if you tap on it, the camera may zoom more than you’d anticipated. The lens measures 6-18 mm and extends from the camera body in three segments when the Kodak EasyShare-one is turned on. Around the rim of the lens, the camera flaunts its 36-108mm equivalent focal range. In addition to the optical zoom, the EasyShare-one has 3.3x digital zoom, which deteriorates pictures quality and is not recommended. A sliding bar on the LCD screen shows how far the user has zoomed from wide to telephoto and requires a separate push of the ‘T’ end of the toggle to enter the realm of digital zoom.