Should have a Fisher Price label on it

Author's Rating:

Pros: image stabilization, small, occasional quality prints

Cons: horrible AF, cheap build quality, uncomfortable to hold, image quality issues

The Bottom Line: 
All other issues aside, the horrible auto focus makes this camera useless.

Author's Review
Sometimes you are lucky enough to stumble upon a find that is worth twice what you paid for it.  That's a huge compliment to the item's maker.  Kodak seems to be going for the market that seeks out items that are worth half of what is paid for.

Let's try to start with the positives.  The image stabilization works pretty well.  Pictures can look pretty good under ideal conditions.  It uses AA batteries which are cheap and easy to find (although it's green to go with rechargeables.)  There are actual manual settings.  Startup and shutter lag are both minimal.  The 10x zoom is a big number even though the reach doesn't appear to come close to the 35mm equivalent.

Okay, now the negatives.

Let's start this chapter with the observations of the camera itself.  It's very small and can easily slip into a medium-sized pocket.  Its weight is negligible.  This is all fine and good but what really matters is how it feels in your hand.  To me it feels about as comfortable as I would imagine the back seat of a Yugo feels.  Ergonomics were clearly ignored in designing the feel of the camera. 

Okay, the camera exists to take pictures, not to make hands happy.  How does it do?  Well, I guess I'll answer that after the auto focus locks onto something in this brightly-lit outdoor scene.  I hope you're not in a hurry.  Nope, not going to happen.  The AF is extremely poor.  Perhaps the face detection will help with that?  Nope.  The first picture I took of myself had everything in focus BUT my face.  And forget about trying to take a close-up shot of anything as the macro doesn't seem to want to be close to anything so it instead tries to focus on as distant a point as it can find.

After spending the day clicking away, we have some images.  They actually don't look all that bad.  I rather enjoy Kodak's unrealistic vividness but that can be tweaked in Photoshop for those who don't like it.  Now anybody who has spent time using high quality cameras knows all about chromaic abberation.  This is a purple tinge around distant lines such as branches or in areas of high dynamic range like looking at a bright window in a dark room.  This camera suffers badly from this fault, particularly in regards to dynamic range.  Another image issue is the bokeh, or the out of focus areas.  In many of my images there are trees against the sky in the background and they look like they were smudged rather than blurred and they look like they were crudely cut and pasted onto the sky background.

Build quality is the final issue I'm going to address.  After using the camera for less than 1 day, I could already hear that awful grinding sound of dirt in the lens whenever I zoomed.  There is an inexplicable ridge of plastic around the LCD that traps dirt and condensation on the screen.  The overall feel of the camera in the hand is that of a toy.