Kodak EasyShare V610 Digital Camera Review
By Richard Baguley
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
December 12, 2006
Two heads are better than one, so how about two lenses? The 6.1-megapixel Kodak EasyShare V610 has two non-extending lenses and two image sensors, a design that the company calls its Retina technology. This design provides a wide 10x zoom range from 38-380mm in a very skinny body. The camera is also Bluetooth-enabled and sells for about $300.
The flat surfaces of the V610 look good, but don’t provide much for the fingers to grasp. The zoom control on the back falls under the thumb, but the camera can slip when you are moving from wide to telephoto. Holding the V610 in two hands is more comfortable, and the five buttons on the left side of the back encourage this. These controls are for setting the scene mode, deleting images, accessing the on-screen menu, and reviewing captured and transferring photos. The latter of these kicks off a special menu that allows you to flag images for printing or e-mailing through the included Kodak EasyShare software. The other on-screen menus are a little confusing. There are a lot of options that take a long time to scroll through.
One annoying quirk of the V610 is the pause when switching between lenses. The bottom lens measures 38-114mm and the top measures 130-380mm. Notice the gap between 114mm and 130mm? You’ll definitely see it on the V610, and it will be recorded in movies too. It’s a bit annoying, but it’s the price you pay to carry an ultra-zoom camera in a 0.9-inch thick case. This same quirk is present on all Kodak's dual lens cameras.
The 2.8-inch LCD screen is very good with its 230,000 pixels. It is sharp, bright, and has a very wide viewing angle; it would be great for showing off photos to a group. Unfortunately, the images aren’t going to wow your friends and family. Our tests found that the image quality of the photos wasn’t that good. Colors were inaccurate, with blues and greens in particular being seriously out of line. There was also some noise at higher ISO settings, but this was no worse or better than most other cameras at this price.
Kodak’s Perfect Touch technology can correct for some of these problems. It processes the image in Playback mode to adjust the colors and brighten underexposed pictures, but it’s not perfect and can take several seconds to process an image. There are 22 scene modes, and a decent Movie mode that captures videos at 640 x 480-pixel resolution at 30 frames per second (fps) in MPEG-4 format. You can also use the full 10x zoom range while shooting a movie, but you will get the annoying pause while the camera switches between lenses. If you can't handle the pause, the Nikon Coolpix S4 offers 10x zoom in a compact body. The Panasonic TZ1 also offers 10x zoom from a single lens, and comes with valuable optical image stabilization.
The EasyShare V610 was a little slow to start up and capture photos. It took around 2 seconds before it was ready to take images when turned on, and the shutter delay ranged from 0.43 seconds (with the camera pre-focused) to an unacceptable 1.69 seconds when the camera had to focus before shooting. Both of these are on the long side and could lead to lost images. It also shot at a speed of around 1.6 fps for a maximum of 8 frames. Again, that’s a bit on the slow side; shooting at a football game with this camera could lead to a missed play. The Kodak V570 is faster at 2.3 fps, and the Panasonic TZ1 shoots 2 fps.
The V610 includes a Bluetooth wireless adapter, so it can connect to Bluetooth PCs, printers and cell phones. This definitely makes transferring and printing images easy for those consumers who already have Bluetooth devices.
The Kodak EasyShare V610 is a promising camera; the dual-lens technology allows for a wide zoom range in a small case. And it’s well priced: although it launched at $449, you can pick it up now for around $300. But there are some issues that make it less attractive, such as the poor handling, the lackluster image quality, and the annoying zoom pause. All of this takes the edge off an otherwise attractive camera; hopefully Kodak will deal with these problems in future versions of this model.
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