Kodak EasyShare-One

 

Don’t expect much manual control from this digital camera; you just won’t get it. The shutter speed and aperture cannot be manually set, although there are scene modes optimized for certain shutter speeds and apertures and exposure compensation is available. Users can manually select the ISO, EV compensation, white balance, color mode, focus zone, and metering.

 

The Kodak EasyShare-one has a through-the-lens auto focus system that has two selectable modes: center zone and multi-zone. The latter is the default and measures three zones to evenly focus the picture. The center zone option focuses on the subject in the center only. The camera’s auto focus system shows brackets on the LCD view; they appear red when out of focus and green when they are focused. The EasyShare-one also has a continuous auto focus mode that can be turned on and off in the Capture section of the setup menu. When this mode is engaged and the camera is too close to an object, it cannot adjust and focuses in and out. What is too close? In normal shooting, closer than 24 inches is too close. In the Close-up scene mode, the Kodak EasyShare-one can focus from 4-28 inches in the wide setting and 17-28 inches in the telephoto setting. The focus was quite responsive and worked even when it didn’t look like it worked on the LCD screen. I took some pictures of my son on a swing and the pictures turned out focused – even though he looked like a blur on the LCD. The only problem with the Kodak EasyShare-one’s auto focus system is the lack of an illuminator for dimly lit subjects.

 

The Kodak EasyShare-one does not have a manual focus option.

 

The exposure is automatically controlled, as the shutter speed and aperture are not manually controllable. The Kodak EasyShare-one does let users toy with the exposure compensation which is only available through the touch screen. The standard range of +/- 2 stops is available in 1/3-stop increments.

 

The Kodak EasyShare-one offers the standard three exposure metering modes: Multi-pattern, Center-weighted, and Center-spot. The through-the-lens system takes an average of several zones for the multi-pattern metering. For the center-weighted, the camera measures the lighting from the center of the image and the center-spot uses an even smaller point for measurement. The EasyShare-one has a Backlight scene mode for users afraid to adjust this option; the Backlight scene mode uses the center-weighted metering mode to properly expose subjects in front of bright windows and such.

The Kodak EasyShare-one’s ISO ratings are located in the Capture section of the setup menu. This digital camera has standard options that are found on most compact models. It has an automatic setting, which performed decently in our tests. The automatic ISO range is quite truncated from the manual range at 80-160. Its manual selections are much better: 80, 100, 200, and 400. When these are manually adjusted, there is relatively little noise. These options are located in a menu that does not have live views.

 

The Kodak EasyShare-one has an extremely sparse white balance menu. Most cameras offer seven or eight white balance presets and a manual setting. However, the Kodak EasyShare-one only offers Auto, Daylight, Tungsten, and Fluorescent. There is no live view within the menu, so it’s impossible to tell what colors pictures will contain until they’ve already been taken. The Fluorescent setting looked warm, while the Tungsten setting put off a cool blue tone. Because the flash is used so much, a white balance mode optimized to the camera’s flash would have been helpful, as would a manual setting.

The shutter speed is another one of those specifications that was tweaked from January to October. The original announcement proclaimed a 4-1/1400th of a second range. The released model has an odd 1/2-1/1448th of a second automatic range. While many point-and-shoots shortchange the shutter speeds, this is a bit short for even that. Most compacts extend their range to go as fast as 1/2000th of a second. And many shutters can open for at least a few seconds in the night mode. Thus, the shutter speed range is slightly disappointing and will limit shooting in available light to daylight situations.

 

The Schneider-Kreuznach lens has a wide f/2.8 maximum aperture at the widest end of the 3x optical zoom. It opens as far as f/4.8 at the telephoto end. The aperture can be closed to f/8.0, which is standard for compacts. The aperture cannot be manually controlled, but can be indirectly manipulated using the camera’s exposure compensation function.