Kodak EasyShare Z915

10x zoom without the price magnification

Fri 19 Jun 2009 // 12:58 UTC

Kodak has tried to make the Z915 as simple to use as possible. The menu system has two tabs for camera mode: one for capture and the other for set-up, and you use the four-way controller to scroll through the menus. A nice touch is that you can scroll down to say, histogram, select “on,” and if you then partly depress the shutter, the menu screen clears and you’re ready to shoot.

Can't be too fussy about performance on a 10x zoom at this price

If you’re in manual mode, for example, and you want to make a quick adjustment, press the info button, and at the bottom of the screen, you are presented with a horizontal menu displaying aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings. In playback mode, there’s an additional tab for editing images – you can apply Perfect Touch technology, crop or add a sound tag.

In use, noise was apparent, even at ISO 200, and chromatic aberration was another issue. We also noticed that some shots had an artificial look about them, which is probably the result of all that digital processing. The supplied batteries also ran out of juice after shooting fewer than 200 shots.

Verdict

When it comes to performance, there’s no doubt that the 10x optical zoom is a bonus, although its specification is disappointing at the wide angle end. However, the optical image stabilisation system ensures you get rock-steady images when shooting at the extreme end of the telephoto setting. We also liked the panoramic mode, which was easy to use, and stitches up to three images in-camera. But picture quality was not so glowing. Perhaps we are being a bit hard on a sub-£200 camera with a 10x optical zoom, but we would have preferred it if Kodak had dropped a few features and concentrated a little more on improving performance. ®