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- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 66 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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9 out of 9 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"Very versatile, good for beginners and techies alike"
Pros: 6.1 Megapixels, good use of industry standards (SD card, PictBridge, saves as jpeg and QuickTime), also supports Kodak's EasyShare system
Cons: no major cons, but comments below noted. Cost of accessories offsets bargain.
Summary: I recommended this camera to my wife, since she wanted something "point-and-shoot," while I wanted extra gadgets. This camera offered both worlds, with an automatic setting and support for the EasyShare printer dock for those who just want to take pictures, but a host of available settings that are good for someone who wants to learn more about photography.
And yes, for the Geek, its 6.1 megapixels satisfy. I know, other features also determine image quality, but let's face it; most of you are looking at this camera because of the six point one megapixels. It's got a megapixel for every speaker in a DTS surround sound system.
Images taken on the automatic setting are excellent in bright light, and good in dim light. It's night-time capabilities are somewhat limited, as it's hard to hold steady and prevent motion blur with a longer shutter speed. How much of this is this particular model versus cameras in general, however, I'm not yet knowledgable enough to say.
Its digital zoom doesn't even try to fake you; images taken using it are cropped to smaller resolution rather than interpolated, so this is a feature best turned off. Doing so was easy and intuitive.
Battery life is amazing compared to older cameras. It takes almost four hours to charge the battery, so you can't use it out of the box like you can the AA battery models, but, once charged, it can shoot all day. It comes with a compact battery charger, but it can also be recharged through optional EasyShare devices. A drawback to the supplied charger is that using it involves removing the battery and thus resetting the date. (The camera did remember other settings, like turning off digital zoom.) This problem does not occur when recharging through the aforementioned buy-extra EasyShare dock.
Movies are only compatable with recent versions of Quicktime (6.3 or later), because they're compressed using an mpeg-4 codec. (They're still in .mov format.) Images are jpegs; I recommend fine compression and the full 6.1 megapixel resolution that makes this camera so special, but then again, I splurged on a one GB SD card. It comes out of the box without extra flash RAM, but has a dinky 32 MB internal memory. Die-hard and expert photographers might complain about the lack of .raw format images, but they'd probably rather use an SLR model anyway.
I have not encountered the battery case latch problem that others have with this camera, but I did have similar problems with an older Kodak digital camera, so after past experience and reading your reviews, I also paid extra for Best Buy's "performance guarantee." (Most electronics chains have similar plans and will make darn sure you know about them when you're checking out.)
In all, this camera is good for both amateur photography enthusiasts and people who just want to take pictures, and it's an excellent way for a mixed couple of Geek and Non-Geek to have both without really compromising.
- 1 reply to this review
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I've had my battery latch break, but the battery can still manage to be in place.
Photo quality is not so great -- there's digital artifacts everywhere. Thankfully, these only show when I view photos at close to 100%, and they're certainly not a problem in the crystal-clear 4x6 prints I've got from them.
Where to buy
EasyShare DX7630 Zoom Digital Camera:
$170.00
| store | price | in stock? | rating |
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Mercantila.com
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$170.00 | No |
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