Review “EasyShare” is a lovely name, isn’t it? It’s all soft and cuddly and suggests that your camera is friendly little thing that will let you share your images with all and sundry. Well, top marks to Kodak’s marketing bods for the name, but does the EasyShare M1093 IS deliver in terms of features, performance and ease of use?

Kodak's EasyShare M1093 IS: available in black, red and silver

At less than £128, and even cheaper if you shop around, the EasyShare M1093 IS is aimed squarely at the budget end of the market but, despite its relatively modest price, the camera has one or two surprising features for a model at this price point.

In terms of appearance, the EasyShare M1093 IS a neat looking camera. Our review sample came in matt black, although there are also silver and grey options. It has a very sleek design, with hardly any protruding buttons or switches. On the top - and flush with the body - are the power switch, flash mode button, shutter button and mode select button with choice of smart capture, video, program and scenes.

That said, the shutter is so well camouflaged (black on black) that you have to look hard to spot it. At the back is the 3in LCD composed of 230,000 pixels, and on the right, a zoom switch, playback button, display mode, joystick control, plus delete and share buttons. On the right are exposed DC-in and mini USB ports, and on the bottom, a dock connector and a flap covering a lithium-ion battery and SD/SDHC card slot. Incidentally, the EasyShare M1093 IS comes with 21MB of useable internal memory.

The EasyShare M1093 IS is a compact model, measuring 95.2 x 58.5 x 21.4mm, and weighing 150g on our scales, when loaded with battery and card. it offers a 1/2.3-inch CCD with 10.1Mp (effective), 3x optical zoom equivalent to 35-105mm on a 35mm camera, shutter speed range of 8-1/1448 sec, ISO range 64-3200 with a 6400 ISO option if the picture size is 3.1Mp or less. Image resolution ranges from 3648 x 2736 to 1280 x 960.

Picture perfect? At this price, the image quality leaves little to complain about

The camera also features image stabilisation, face detection, 22 scene modes, such as portrait, landscape and panorama, a burst mode offering a maximum of 3 pictures at 1.5fps, and surprisingly for a camera at this price point, HD movie recording. HD capture is a QuickTime MPEG-4 video at 1280 x 720 resolution and running at 30fps. VGA and QVGA modes are also available at 30fps.

There are some nice touches, like the ability to trim videos, make video bookmarks and even frame grab video images. Good stuff, but it’s a pity that the only way you can view your video in HD resolution on an HD Ready TV is to purchase a Kodak EasyShare HDTV camera dock (yours for £60), as it doesn’t have a mini HDMI port. In fact, if you want to view any images on a TV, you’re going to need an optional mini USB-to-composite video cable, because the only accessories you get are a charger, strap and EasyShare photo management software.

HD video capture but no built-in HDMI port – an HDTV dock is extra

With such a good looking model and a few bonus features for camera in this price bracket, we had high hopes for the M1093 IS, but sadly, it is badly let down by a number of issues, most of which are related to handling. Let’s start at the beginning. Kodak provides what looks like a thick instruction manual, but in fact, it’s a multi-lingual start-up guide, which provides little in the way of detail.

Many manufacturers put the instruction manual on a CD-Rom in the form of a PDF file, certainly not as handy as a paper manual, but Kodak goes one step further; you have to log onto Kodak’s website and download the manual from there. Not a good start. Then there was the display. Instead of putting “display” or even a “D” next to the display button, Kodak puts a logo consisting of three dots and three horizontal lines. The instruction manual doesn’t tell you what the share button is for and the index is incomplete.

Moving on to the camera; power on takes around two seconds but for some reason, power off takes the best part of five seconds. The M1093 is also sluggish when it comes to writing images to the card; it takes several seconds. We didn’t like the flash and mode buttons being on top, as it was easy to accidentally press the latter when operating the shutter.

The zoom button is not as convenient as a lever located at the front and the joystick operation is fiddly. If you want to adjust, say, the ISO speed – which can only be done in Program mode – press the menu button and then move the joystick to the right to select the Capture+ menu. Then, scroll down a two-column menu until you reach ISO speed in the left column, which is now highlighted.

Joystick navigation quirks take the pleasure out of customising settings

Now, you might think the natural thing to do would be to move the joystick to the right hand column to select the ISO speed, but if you do that, you lose your place in the menu, because you have to press the joystick before moving it to the right. Grrrrr! The EasyShare M1093 IS has various menus and tabbed menus, all of which all have to be navigated with the blessed joystick.

Sample Shots

ISO 64
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ISO 100
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ISO 200
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ISO 400
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ISO 800
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ISO 1600
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ISO 3200
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ISO 6400: this setting operates at a lower resolution
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Sample Shots

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Sample Shots

Close-up
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Wide angle

Tele-photo
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Panorama
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Still from video
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All this is a shame, because, the EasyShare M1093 IS gave a pretty good performance. Picture quality was sharp and colours were well saturated. Noise levels were pretty low, even around ISO 800. The Panorama feature was one of the best we’ve used and produced some nice results.

Panorama mode is among the best we've encountered

The 3x zoom is a bit of a disappointment and makes the image stabilisation system a bit redundant. We tried zooming with it on and off and didn’t see any difference in the results. In smart capture mode, the camera only seemed to switch between macro and landscape modes, but coped fine with most kinds of shots. The wide angle setting is a bit of a letdown though. Video looked smooth, although we didn’t get a chance to view it on an HD Ready set, as we didn’t have an HDTV adapter.

The battery is powered from within the camera body, and you can use a special USB cable to charge the EasyShare M1093 IS from a PC but, again, this is optional. The battery power turned out to be another issue as it ran out of juice around the 150 frames mark. We think anyone buying a camera at this price would be happy with the pictures. It’s just a shame Kodak has made something of a dog’s dinner with the handling.

Verdict

The EasyShare M1093 IS is a budget camera with one or two surprising features, including HD movie recording. It’s smart, compact and produces pretty good pictures. However, Kodak has missed a trick when it comes to handling, and it seems that style rather than functionality was the main focus. ®

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