Kodak Easyshare M420
Review Kodak’s Easyshare M420 is aimed at the person looking for a reasonably cheap and convenient, compact Camera that will basically take care of business, allowing you to simply point and shoot. As Kodak’s founder George Eastman once said: “You press the button, we do the rest.” So, the Easyshare M420 is cheap, but is it cheerful?
Kodak’s Easyshare M420
First impressions were mixed when we removed the Easyshare M420 from its box. It’s certainly compact, measuring 97.2 x 59.7 x 210mm and weighing 155 grams with battery and card. It fits snugly in a pocket and is great for carrying around. But this being Kodak, there are one or two idiosyncrasies. The first is the inclusion of a paper user guide that basically gets you started with the Easyshare M420 – there’s not even a full PDF manual on a CD-Rom and you have to go online to download one.
The second issue is the curious battery charging system that involves plugging a USB cable into a mini USB port on the bottom of the Camera and then connecting that to a charging unit that plugs into a power socket – there is no separate charging cradle. Kodak markets spare batteries for this Camera, but the recharging system means you can’t charge one battery whilst using a second one.
The Easyshare M420 comes with a three-inch LCD screen composed of 230,000 dots, and uses SD/SDHC cards and a lithium-ion battery. There’s also 64MB of internal memory, with 48MB available for storing mages. When it comes to features, the Easyshare M420 has a 1/2.33-inch CCD with 10Mp (effective) and a 4x optical zoom in the shape of a Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon f/2.6–5.8 lens – try saying that after a few beers – equivalent to a 28–112 mm zoom on a 35 mm Camera.
Images resolution ranges from 3648 x 2736 to 1280 x 960 with an ISO range of 64-1600, which can extend to 3200 and 6400 provided image sizes are 3.1MP or less. The shutter speed ranges from 1/1000sec – 8 sec, long time exposure, which sets the shutter speed from 0.5 to 8 seconds with several increments in between.
Considering its size, you get a decent wide-angle lens with a 4x zoom
Other features include a face detection system that detects up to ten faces, image stabilisation system, burst mode, VGA and QVGA video at 30fps recorded as QuickTime Motion JPEG, plus various scene modes and in-Camera editing, that includes cropping and trimming.
The Easyshare M420 is nice to carry around but its handling is not so great. There’s the layout of the top three control buttons for a start. These are used for setting the flash mode, power on and off, and to operate the shutter. The three buttons are small, have the same silver colouring and are packed close together, making it difficult to determine the right one to press.
Finger trouble: indistinct buttons take some getting used to
A number of times we tried powering up the Easyshare M420 only to find that our finger was in fact pressing the shutter button. Just below this array is a tiny slider for selecting Smart Capture mode (aka Intelligent Auto), video and scene modes and here too, we often found ourselves selecting the video when we really wanted the scene modes. Power on is slow and the Easyshare M420 takes around six seconds to get up and running. It takes roughly the same time to power down as well.
In the Smart Capture Mode, the Easyshare M420 does everything for you, except, it seems, press the shutter. In this mode, the Camera analyses the scene and sets the parameters – users can select the picture size and aspect ratio and that’s about it. The scene mode offers 22 settings that include program, landscape, backlight, portrait and panorama. These are selected with a multi-controller and central OK button, and the scene mode menu helpfully includes icons and text descriptions.
The menu system content depends on the shooting mode but, in program mode, for example, you can use it to adjust thirteen parameters including exposure compensation, focus mode, white balance, exposure metering options and AF zones. The set-up menu offers the usual settings including, sound and LCD screen brightness, however, in playback mode, there’s an additional menu for editing images, such as cropping.
In some shooting modes, pressing a small info button puts short-cut icons on the LCD screen. Apply this in program mode and you can get icons for adjusting exposure compensation, self-timer and AF mode. It won’t take users too long to get to grips with using the Easyshare M420, but the tiny buttons, clunky menu system and general sluggishness do not make this the friendliest of cameras to use.
Various shortcuts help minimise menu browsing
At £170, the Easyshare M420 is up against some strong competition, but there are some good deals if you shop around. Even so, at this price point, you are not going to get the ultimate in performance, but we were, frankly, underwhelmed with how the Easyshare M420 fared.
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 400
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ISO 1600
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
Click for a full-resolution crop
No backlight compensation
Backlight compensation active
Burst mode
Click for a scaled QuickTime image sequence
Close-up, nearest focusing distance, 15cm
Click for a full-resolution crop
Wide angle
Tele-photo
Click for a full-resolution crop
Panorama
Click for a larger scaled image
Panorama
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Panorama
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Panorama
Click for a larger scaled image
Panorama
Click for a larger scaled image
Noise was an issue, even at low ISO speeds, and images were soft. Many shots seemed to have too much digital processing applied to them. Indeed, in Smart Capture mode, the Easyshare M420 automatically applies Kodak’s Perfect Touch picture enhancing technology and the results look artificial. The macro setting did not offer close-up shooting – we couldn’t get any closer than 15cm to our euro coin and even then, the results were not great.
Plenty of features, but it is a budget Camera and it shows
The burst mode is a poor person’s continuous shooting mode, offering just three frames, and we are scratching our heads as to why Kodak has included long time exposure on a Camera of this type. Even when using the shortest exposure time of half a second in this mode, daylight images were completely bleached out and there is no way of manually adjusting the aperture. We tried tweaking the exposure compensation control, but that had no effect.
It wasn’t all bad. The wide angle lens and the 4x optical zoom are good to have on a Camera at this price point. The backlight function, designed for shooting subjects with a strong light behind them works well, although the resulting image looks a tad harsh. We also liked the panorama feature, which stitches together two or three images in-Camera.
Verdict
Add the so-so performance to the handling issues and it’s hard to get enthusiastic about this Camera. Sure, it’s cheap, but as the saying goes, price isn’t everything. On the plus side, the Easyshare M420 is very portable, has a wide angle lens and will do all the thinking for you, if that’s what you want. But Kodak seems to have put looks over handling when it comes to the ergonomics, and we have seen better results from other budget models.
Suggested Price: £170
This entry was posted
on Sunday, August 9th, 2009 at 4:27 am and is filed under Cam & Camera.
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