Kodak EasyShare Z950

With looks that remind you a little of Kodak's glory days back in the era of film-based cameras, the Z950 joins their product lineup with its 10x stabilised optical zoom and HDTV 720p video mode. But will those arguments be enough to win over buyers?

Handling

The visual design of the Kodak Z950 is not unlikable, though its throwback looks may put some people off. This is a compact that doesn't really go after elegance and slimness, aiming instead at a somewhat solid look and comfortable handling. The handgrip has a rubbery coating that has a rather nice feel, and the camera is well proportioned.


The zoom control is a little 'soft' and you'll have little trouble zooming to exactly the right spot on the first try. But the most annoying thing about the zoom, obviously, is the wide-angle, which isn't really a wide-angle at all, with its minimum focal length of 35 mm. 


The LCD screen is large and its display is very fluid, even in low light, but the resolution is a little low at 230,000 dpi for a 3'' display and the vertical viewing angles are a little narrow.


The graphical interface is user-friendly, but there are still some frustrating aspects remain. For example, by default, the joystick controls a shooting setting and it's just too easy to change it accidentally.

Responsiveness

At 2.6 seconds, startup isn't really what you can call fast. Focusing, on the other hand, is fairly speedy, provided you stay in wide-angle; at 10x, it has trouble making up its mind and takes well over a second to home in. The time between saving shots is fairly short, but it's impossible to take four shots in a row quickly, because the camera locks up while it's saving the third.


Image Quality

With an aperture of f/3.5 in wide-angle, the stabilisation and electronic noise management features have got their work cut out for them, even in ordinary shooting conditions. The noise management was a pleasant surprise – the Kodak Z950 produced some fairly handsome images, though some graininess was already visible at the lowest sensitivities and up to 400 ISO and even 800 ISO. Beyond that, smoothing was very pronounced, and at 3200 ISO, the image is reduced to 3 Megaixels and becomes almost unusable.


The image stabilisation also works fairly well. We took a good series of blur-free photos at 1/6 s. The lens was subject to visible distortion in wide-angle (even at only 35 mm), but overall it's of fairly high quality, with good detail over the entire frame. In telephoto mode, the image is a little less crisp, but really not dramatically so. As is so often the case, the small sensor has some trouble managing bright areas, and unfortunately the Z950 has a slight tendency to overexpose the images.


The macro mode isn't extraordinary, with a focusing limit of 12 cm. The flash works fairly well, but sometimes lacks a little power.

Video

We were disappointed by the video mode. Kodak may have been the pioneer in this area, but the quality of the 720p mode isn't really satisfactory, with compression effects very visible and too much shimmering. Some VGA modes are more pleasant to watch. The output format is .mov using MPEG-4 compression. Sound is recorded in mono. The optical zoom works while recording and focuses continuously, though the latency time is relatively long.