Entered CNET Catalog: 01/22/2004
SKU: 0041778662274
Manufacturer: Eastman Kodak Co.
Manufacturer description
Marketing description is not available.Product summary
The good: Solid image quality; easy operation; excellent burst mode; outstanding battery life.
The bad: No manual exposure/focus controls; no TIFF/raw options; no diopter adjustment; memory card not included.
The bottom line: Clean design, fast operation, and a great burst mode are the hallmarks of this 4-megapixel shooter for the point-and-click crowd.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 01/13/2005
Top-mounted controls include a power-on button illuminated by a blue LED that's bright enough to read by, a flash-mode key, and a rotating wheel that cycles through the main shooting modes, which are displayed on the back panel. When the icon for the mode you want (Auto, Portrait, Close-Up, Scenes, Video, or Favorite Review) is illuminated, you press the jog wheel to activate it. Selecting Scenes produces an LCD menu of choices such as Night or Sport. Because the mode indicators are each illuminated by a flashing red LED and described on the LCD, it's easy to choose these settings under the dimmest ambient illumination.
The back panel is clean and well laid out. The 1.8-inch LCD is centered and flanked on the left by Delete, Menu, Review, and Share buttons and on the right by a four-way controller pad that rocks up, down, left, and right to navigate menus or controls and is depressed to activate a selection. The zoom toggle is concentric with the four-way button.
Shooting options other than flash mode require a trip to the well-designed menu system, where you can make adjustments to exposure compensation, white balance, ISO setting, focus zone, and metering mode. You'll also find the burst mode and self-timer there. Unfortunately, most settings other than picture quality return to their defaults once you turn off the camera. A second menu layer invokes a setup menu for more permanent settings, such as picture review, sound volume, and date stamps.
The upper-left corner of the back panel includes the optical viewfinder and a "ready" LED that turns green when autofocus and exposure are set and flashes when an image is being stored.
Although the Kodak EasyShare LS743 sports a 2.8X zoom lens instead of the more common 3X type, you probably won't notice the difference. The 36mm (35mm-film-camera equivalent) wide-angle view is broad enough for most indoor shooting, and the 100mm (equivalent) telephoto setting actually shaves just 8mm from what you'd get with a full 3X magnification. The Schneider-Kreuznach C-Variogon lens name lends some cachet and nostalgia for film-camera veterans but, more importantly, focuses down to 2 inches at the wide-angle setting in macro mode and 12 inches at full telephoto.
While there are no manual exposure settings other than exposure compensation to plus or minus 2EV in 1/2EV steps, you can customize how the camera makes its decisions by selecting multipattern, center-weighted, or spot metering, as well as multizone or center-zone TTL autofocus. You can also choose from three white-balance settings and set ISO from 80 to 800. (The camera uses only ISO 80 to 160 in automatic ISO mode.) Shutter speeds up to 1/1,400 second are selected by the camera, and there's also a Long Time exposure option that specifies exposures from 0.5 to 16 seconds.
The nine scene modes (Night, Night Portrait, Sport, Landscape, Snow, Beach, Party, Self Portrait, and Museum) do a good job of optimizing shutter speed and aperture for specific types of shooting. The Sports setting is particularly fun to use when coupled with the camera's 3-frame-per-second, 6-shot burst mode. There's also the increasingly common automatic picture-rotation feature that orients your vertical and horizontal shots correctly for display.
One cool feature is the Share button, which lets you slot pictures into an in-camera photo album for viewing as a "favorites" or tag them for printing. You can also share your pictures with as many as 32 e-mail addresses, marking them in the camera, then sending the shots automatically when downloaded from the camera to your computer's EasyShare software. While reviewing or tagging pictures, you can magnify the images up to 4X on the LCD.
Flash options are rather basic, with only automatic, fill (always on), red-eye, and off available, and flash range is limited to about 10 feet at the wide-angle setting and a mere 6 feet in telephoto mode.
Movie shooters will find the LS743 a poor substitute for a camcorder, with 640x480 clips captured at a jerky 13fps. The length of your movies is limited only by available memory; a 512MB SD card can record more than half an hour of sound and motion.
Photographers who like to snap off consecutive shots quickly will be pleased with the Kodak EasyShare LS743's performance. If an unexpected photo opportunity pops up, this camera is good to go, whether you're reviewing photos on the LCD, making an adjustment in a menu, or simply not paying attention. If the camera's on, just bring it to your eye and click away. After the first shot, you can take additional pictures every 1.8 seconds (2.5 seconds using the flash). Or you can switch to burst mode and crank off 6 pictures in less than 2 seconds.
Unfortunately, if the camera is not on already, you'll have to wait about 6 seconds for it to wake up. Shutter lag was decent at 0.7 second under high-contrast lighting conditions but quite long under low-contrast lighting, where the nonassisted autofocus thrashed around for 1.7 seconds before locking in.
Kodak touts its "indoor/outdoor" LCD, and it was usable as a viewfinder outdoors, even under direct sunlight. Because the LCD shows 100 percent of the picture, it's a better choice for close-ups than the small, non-parallax-corrected optical viewfinder, which displays only 80 percent of the image and doesn't have diopter adjustment.
Purple fringing that showed up around the highlights of many of our pictures was the most glaring defect to mar the otherwise good image quality produced by the Kodak EasyShare LS743. Pictures were generally sharp and detailed. Colors, especially flesh tones, were realistic in most cases, although some tended to have, if anything, a bit too much saturation. We detected a slight blue cast in some photos, and although exposures were generally good, there was a tendency for some highlights to blow out. Noise was not a problem at lower ISO settings but reared its ugly head at ISO 400 to 800. The highest sensitivity setting is available only at the lowest-resolution Good setting, so you probably won't be using it much, anyway.User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20out of 20 user reviews
Great Camera for sub-Rs.20,000
Pros: Good Battery Life; Picture Quality & Looks
Cons: Poor Flash, Small Buttons
The Pics OUTDOOR are great, especially during day-light.
However, the pics requiring FLASH were not great especially when distance is more.
Overall, I am a very satisfied user and would recommend it to anyone wanting a decent low-priced digicam with VIDEO feature.
I think now even the price has been loweered, so go ahead and HAPPY CLICKING.
out of 20 user reviews
Tough to beat!
Pros: Good pix & Software
Cons: Could have been cheaper, but quality cost :)
out of 20 user reviews
Awesome Cam - Easy to Use + Great Pics!!
Pros: Easy to use, Great Pics, Metal Body
Cons: Only 3x zoom, but that is standard for this type of cam
out of 20 user reviews
Nice Pictures and Great Price
Pros: Bought two for $99.99 each at Frys Electronic. Great Pictures Quality, and Clip Recording without limitation.
Cons: Clips format is MOV with Special Compression and cannot be play with regular MAC QuickTime Player
out of 20 user reviews
Could be a contender, but weird GUI & poor flash make it a 5
Pros: Small, well built, lots of features
Cons: Flash is not in the same room, GUI is from outerspace
Flash: The timing on the flash is off, or something. Every indoor picture is too dark.
Reviewing pictures: There is no way to just turn the camera on and review pictures without the lense extending. I'm so use to our old PowerShot allowing you to review photos this is so annoying.
GUI: They have this wheel on top to choose picture modes, a flash button, a W/T button, an OK button, and an up, down, left, right button. You really have to think about what you want do when using this camera. ARRGH!
out of 20 user reviews
A great, simple camera
Pros: Bought it for $250 with memory card to replace our bulky Sony Mavica CD300 that we had spent $1,000 on three years ago. Takes nice, clean pictures with lots of color. My wife carries it in her purse to take pictures of the baby.
Cons: Have to take out battery to charge.
out of 20 user reviews
Nice camera but horrible for indoors
Pros: Light, elegant, and nice outdoor picture taking
Cons: I have never seen a digital camera with the worst indoor quality. Maybe a 1/2 megapixel digi-cam will fare better
out of 20 user reviews
Outstanding camera for its price
Pros: Picture quality, Ease of use, EasyShare options, Battery Life
Cons: Internal memory too less (16MB), Little slow in picture saving after shoot.
out of 20 user reviews
Despite the reviewer's opinion...as a user of many cameras, over the years, this is a FINE, HANDY ca
Pros:
Cons:
out of 20 user reviews
great camera, if you don't mind a weak flash and overly compressed images
Pros: - good, sturdy design - very quick and easy to use - decent feature set
Cons: - very weak flash (my results on indoor shots were not very good) - the amount of compression applied at the highest quality setting was unacceptable. The images consistently had a washed-out look, especially in photos that had areas of fine detail. This
out of 20 user reviews
Small, easy to use, and good lookin
Pros: You have to give Kodak props for delivering an easy to use, compact digital camera. The functionality is straightforward. You can pick it up and start taking picture. Sure there are other manufacturers, Sony, Canon, which offer a comparable product, but
Cons: None yet. Just received this for Christmas
out of 20 user reviews
Great Camera without all the fuss!
Pros: The image quality is great, and it has just enough features without it getting confusing to use. There isn't any dead time swiching functions. It's a great, all around camera
Cons: LCD screen doesn't light up well in the dark, no zoom on video
out of 20 user reviews
Obscure Accessory Compatiblity
Pros: Great Camera...a tour de force!
Cons: EasyShare Camera Dock 6000 product number covers two distinctly different (and incompatible) products. One of them doesn't work for the LS753. Why would a company commit the worst sin of any quality-oriented manufacturing organization...putting one prod
out of 20 user reviews
Great for Everyday Use
Pros: Small, easy to use, can change settings to mimic manual settings on professional cameras, fairly good night pics with no flash
Cons:
out of 20 user reviews
Great except for 1 thing
Pros: Loved everything as everyone else has already stated.
Cons: Have a big problem with my photos coming out very dark when I am more than about 5 feet away. When I raise the exposure settings I end up getting blurry photos. If you can't be close up, the camera sucks!
out of 20 user reviews
I spent a full year evaluating digital cameras and chose this one. Delighted with camera!
Pros: Light and easy to carry. Easy to change exposure settings for bright light or dark rooms. Flash off setting is great for dark timed exposures.
Cons: None in my view.
out of 20 user reviews
my favorit fun toycomes with super software
Pros: just enough adjustments to play with so you can make your own personal difference
Cons: check back in a year
out of 20 user reviews
Gotta get it!
Pros: You can turn off the LCD screen to save battery. Very easy to use and it has a fun dial that you can turn to change the settings without having to get lost in a huge menu. Great lens and picture quality!
Cons:
out of 20 user reviews
Great Qualiy and Just Enough Features
Pros: Great camera quality! I bought this camera for a wedding and photos came out great. Video mode alowed me to catch some great moments. It also has a good shutter speed making it easier to capture moments as they happen. Decent start up time. Compact siz
Cons: Sometimes get blur, but there is an action photo mode that helps that.
out of 20 user reviews
Great Camera - just enough features for me!!
Pros: Takes great photos. All the different modes are just outstanding. The sport mode made it real easy to take pictures of my sons in their school races. Took a photo of my 10 year old running full out with no blurring or double type exposure.
Cons: Microphone doesn't pick up well when using the video mode.
