Product: Kodak EasyShare Z915 Digital Camera
Manufacturer: Kodak
MSRP:  $200  Find Lowest Price @ PriceGrabber
Author: Bill
Date: June 7, 2009

Kodak has recently limited its camera offerings to Point-and-Shoot digital cameras, and has presented its products as being easy to use. Their latest offering is the EasyShare Z915, and promises a large optical zoom in a relatively small body. The last Kodak product I used was positive slide film, so I went into this having never used an EasyShare camera before.

Packaging

The EasyShare came packaged in a cardboard box, which kept the product protected well through shipping. Inside I found the camera, abridged user guide, software disk, USB cable, and wrist-strap. Batteries were included with the product, but a memory card was not.

The Camera

This camera looks smart. Mine was matte black, but Kodak is offering models in red, blue, and slate as well. The screen is outlined with a glossy border, housing four dedicated buttons next to the four-way D-pad. The screen is well lit, as has excellent resolution and color saturation for its mediocre size. Up top, there are only a few dedicated buttons and a mode selector. The flash is built into the front face. Behind the 10x optical zoom lens is a ten-megapixel CCD sensor. A locking door on the bottom face allows access to the two AA batteries and SD/SDHC card slot. 32 megabytes of internal memory are provided, but Kodak EasyShare features are not available on photos stored in internal memory.

In my hands, something feels wrong about the camera. It’s decidedly boxy, borrowing its lines from rangefinders. The right-hand side of the camera is laid out appropriately, with enough room for my hand, but this leaves my left hand scrambling for room. In the weeks I had this camera, I could not find an appropriate and comfortable way to hold the device.

The top controls are comfortable, responsive, and well placed. I found the location of the dedicated flash toggle especially handy. On the back, the four buttons next the screen were worthless. They floated on their mountings and did not appear straight. Pressing them was challenging, and did not have enough positive feedback. The D-Pad was equally poor, and limited my ability to press it in rapid succession.

The camera offers automatic zone metering, spot, and center-weighted metering. It will auto-focus on multiple zones, and will automatically detect and follow faces. I found the face-detection to be spot-on, and it tracked faces moving throughout the frame well. There is no manual focus, which I would have appreciated during macro operation.

The lens is acceptable for point-and-shoot operation. It offers a limited range of apertures (f/3.5-f/4.8), and is as optically precise as the sensor mandates. Sensor noise is highly noticeable at sensitivities at and above ISO-400.

The camera has a USB mini-a connector, but has a proprietary connector. This is an asinine practice that I have noticed on some Nikon Coolpix cameras as well.

Performance

The menu system is simplistic, keeping with the EasyShare theme. Switching shooting modes activates a help display explaining the uses of the current mode. It does not go away quickly, and can interrupt a quick shot. The camera boasts a 0.3 second power-on-to-capture time, which is accurate and impressive.

I found the camera to be generally sluggish in multiple ways. Manual control is unusable because of the poor directional pad. I could not rapidly change aperture or shutter settings. At times, the camera decided to autofocus a scene and would pause my zooming operation to do so. I wasn’t particularly focused on missing a great shot, but it was still frustrating to have an unresponsive machine in my hands.

The poor directional pad mitigates even aperture-priority and shutter-priority modes’ usefulness. Repetitive button presses are difficult to accomplish quickly. I would have liked to see a jog-wheel, or at the very least a more tactilely responsive push-button control.

Movies have impressive quality, but don’t expect solid low-light performance. Scene shooting offers a smattering of presents to choose from, and they are presented in a typical “EasyShare” way, with detailed descriptors. This is the one time I enjoyed having the help tooltips present, as point-and-shoot cameras often leave the decoding of scene icons to the user-manual (or your imagination).

Flash photography performed as expected for a point-and-shoot with a forward facing flash. Red-eye reduction was so-so, and slow sync flash photography is not supported. I was able to shoot continuously on the included AA batteries for around 200 flash shots before the batteries were depleted. Throughout, the flash recharge times remained fairly consistent (but increasing as the batteries drained), averaging less than three seconds. Expect around 500 frames without flash on a fresh set of batteries.

Exporting photos using the USB interface requires the included Kodak software. The camera does not appear as a mass storage device when connected, which was unfortunate, but follows suit with the streamlined Kodak EasyShare environment.

Test Shots

Here are a handful of test shots taken with the Z915.

Conclusions

For the price, I cannot warrant the purchasing of this camera, despite its extensive attempts at ease-of-use. It strikes me as a simplistic camera attempting to be a top-of-the-line point-and-shoot, but gets bogged down by assuming the operator’s ignorance with the cameras functions. It offers impressive optics for a point-and-shoot camera of its size, but don’t expect a miraculous image. The sensor is still small and noisy at high sensitivities.

If you are in the market to purchase a first-time digital camera, a cheaper model that does not have cutting-edge specifications will be more appropriate. Alternatively, there are more powerful/useful point-and-shoot cameras in this price range.

Pros

+ Detailed descriptions of functions are plentiful on-screen
+ 10x optical zoom, 10 megapixel sensor, optical image stabilization, and other high-end features are present
+Relatively small form-factor for the included optics

Cons

- Deplorable controls cripple the cameras usability
- The camera was sometimes sluggish to respond to commands
- USB connector is proprietary and the camera does not work as a USB mass-storage device

Tags: Camera, digital, EasyShare, Kodak, point and shoot, Z915