KODAK EasyShare DX7590 Digital Came review

The Kodak EasyShare DX7590 bristles with advanced features. You can choose full automatic or programmed exposure, use shutter- or aperture-priority modes, or set shutter speed and f-stop yourself in manual mode. There's also a Custom mode you can use to save your own exposure, flash, image quality, white-balance, ISO, or other settings. The 14 scene modes do a good job of optimizing your photos for common shooting situations, including close-ups, flower photography (close-ups in bright daylight), landscapes, night landscapes, night portraits, snow and beach scenes, fireworks, text, museums (with sound and flash disabled), self-portrait, parties, children, and backlighting.

The Kodak performed decently, emerging from its power-off slumber in 3.9 seconds, then snapping off pictures every 1.8 seconds thereafter, with a slight slowdown for flash recycling that stretched the time to 2.4 seconds. The EasyShare DX7590 supplies two burst modes. The traditional mode captured 5 full-resolution frames in 2.1 seconds. The Last Shot mode, which we're increasingly seeing in newer cameras, grabs up to 30 shots in a row while the shutter release is depressed but saves only the last 5 images. This mode is perfect for, say, capturing a high jumper clearing the bar. You can start shooting just before the leap and let go of the shutter release as the leap is completed, capturing only the peak moments. Shutter lag under high-contrast lighting was acceptable at 0.8 second but, thanks to the lack of a light assist, ballooned to 1.1 seconds under difficult low-contrast lighting conditions.

The DX7590 loses a lot of detail for a 5-megapixel camera--the crop on the left should show the texture of a grosgrain ribbon--and postprocessing blurs detail as well. For instance, in the right crop of a stuffed animal's fur, you should be able to make out the individual hairs.

Photo quality is acceptable if you don't plan on making enlargements. Colors were bright and saturated and exposures generally good, although we noticed a bluish cast in many daylight photos and a bit of a warm tone in photos shot under incandescent light, even when using a white-balance preset; there is no custom white-balance capability. The dynamic range is squeezed toward the middle--photos lack detail in dark areas and tend to wash out highlights. But the worst defect was pronounced purple fringing, most noticeably around backlit objects. JPEG artifacts also appeared that tended to reduce the detail of the image somewhat. Noise was a problem at higher ISO settings; ISO 800 is available at only the lowest-quality 1.8-megapixel setting, so you probably won't be using that option except as a last resort.