#1: Kodak Easyshare P880 8MP Digital Camera with 5.8x Wide Angle Optical Zoom Reviews!
I am shooting with D70 for many years now. Well, we are going to have a family vacation which doesn't allow me to haul my D70 stuff. So I'm keep searching for a smaller and lighter camera with excellent range but cheap as well. All of sudden I saw this one in a private company they buy stuff from bankruptcy companies like CC. He got 3 of them either demo or returned units. I grab the nicest one. After shooting with it I'm very pleased with the pictures and handling. The exposure is accurate. I always have my own settings on D70. Later on I found out that my custom settings doesn't work on Kodak. Kodak exposure system is dam accurate. That's the best I had. It balances the bright area and shadow area very well. The battery life is superb. I use EVF all the time and the battery just keep going without any bar decease. Amazing!
Concerns:
* A little bit big for my camera bag. I have to squeeze it a little bit for the sake of odd positioned(but very functional) EVF.
* Lens not as clean as prime lens, but better than most of the DSLR kit lens.
* Wrting time to SD card is kind of slow in seconds. I tried a 20M/s card but not quite satisfied yet.
In all, I feel very lucky that I go this camera. I'm thinking of getting rid of my D70 stuff now.
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Kodak Easyshare P880 8MP Digital Camera with 5.8x Wide Angle Optical Zoom Features
- 8-megapixel digital camera captures enough detail for photo-quality 16 x 22-inch prints
- 5.8x optical zoom; 2.5-inch high-resolution LCD display
- New RAW file support, with JPEG and TIFF capture; RAW editing with Kodak EasyShare software v5.1 (included)
- Includes high-resolution electronic viewfinder and hot shoe flash connector and PC flash sync (built-in flash also included)
- Powered by Lithium-ion battery (battery and charger included)
Customer Reviews
Incredibly aggravating! - 150 F3 -
It's such a shame this camera is so infuriating to use.
There's nothing optically wrong with it. The lens is fantastic. The sensor is incredibly good. When the camera is working, it's a pleasure to use and delivers lovely photos. I find program mode works the best. Black and whites are beautiful. ISO 400 works perfectly for action photos in bright daylight. Battery life is fantastic.
List of severe problems:
Preview histogram is completely useless. Photos are always much brighter than histogram. The photographer has to guess how much underexposure is needed to compensate for the misleading histogram feature. I hate having to correct the camera 2 or 3 times because a histogram with nothing on the right 1/3d still winds up being badly overexposed. Didn't Kodak take their product out into the field to test whether the histogram gave accurate information? It would have taken 5 minutes of parking lot photography to reveal this inexcusable shortcoming.
Highlight clipping warning system behaves the same way as the histogram. Seemingly small, well controlled highlights become massive areas of blown out overexposure when the photo is taken. It's awkward and aggravating to have to correct the camera 3 or 4 times thanks to this half baked feature. I want to expose to the right for a strong, bright signal, but can never trust the P880's weird, uncalibrated metering approach.
Power switch is completely useless. Camera shuts down right when I'm ready to take the picture. I'm constantly fighting to keep the stupid camera on and missing shot after shot after shot after shot after shot. Power switches should not cause rage and disappointment. They are well known electronic components. Why Kodak decided to use a rotating switch directly in contact with the shutter button and put a "favorites" setting I have no use for on the same ring is a mystery. I hate this camera's completely unreliable power switch design. I want it to stay on, not turn off over and over and over when I'm trying to enjoy photography. This is the only consumer electronics device in my life that is incapable of staying on. It's a fatal flaw that makes me feel nothing but regret that I opted for a "prosumer, high end" camera that totally fails to work 3 years in. I mistakenly presumed spending more on a camera would mean better quality. Wrong.
Time lapse is completely useless at night or in low light. It does not allow exposures longer than 0.5 seconds in MANUAL MODE. I can understand it objecting if I'm trying to do 11 second exposures every 10 seconds, but why can't it give me at least 4 seconds? What is the reason? Kodak needs to let the user have full manual control of all settings and allow full functionality at all times. Even if I wanted a series of 16 second exposures, the camera's firmware should be bright enough to just wait 10 seconds after processing each photo. The 0.5 second limit still applies with a 30 second delay. It's this kind of poor interface that ruins photography and makes me want to give up. Sometimes I want to use f/8, ISO 50, and more than 0.5 seconds, but the camera won't let me.
Aperture priority and shutter priority are completely useless, unless the goal is getting bad exposures. I bought this model for those features, but never use them. I can't use them because I have absolutely zero faith they will work at all.
Video is completely useless, unless the goal is 640x240 video blown up to 640x480. My Canon point and shoot from 3 years earlier was able to deliver crystal clear 640x480 video using all the pixels. Kodak apparently believes blocky, interpolated video is good enough. Why put in the video feature if it doesn't live up to the product's advertised claims? I bought the camera to ENJOY having video functionality with its nice lens. Now all I feel is cheated and disappointed.
Infinity focus is completely useless. The vast majority of infinity focus photos are completely blurry. It's so annoying to have to find something else to prefocus on when the subject you want won't lock in. Seems Kodak didn't bother to test this feature in real life situations. Why does the lens motor try to focus when the camera has been informed to simply focus at infinity? I don't understand why infinity focus is so difficult and elusive. Why put the feature in if it fails to work over and over and over? Terrible engineering! Pathetic. Ridiculous! Why, when infinity focus fails to work, does it default to focusing as close as possible to the camera, then taking the shot? Shouldn't it go the other way?
Super macro mode is bad. It offers no white balance choice. I don't mind setting white balance. I wouldn't mind if it defaulted to Auto. But why take away user control for a pretty important aspect of digital photography? There's no exposure compensation option either! All super macros in daylight become bluish, overexposed, and mediocre.
The scroll wheel behaves oddly. Moving it one click often activates it 3 clicks in the opposite direction. I have to repeatedly correct the camera's poor interface. The lack of fine, intuitive control is very frustrating.
Raw format offers nothing compelling, except revealing how pathetic the camera truly is deep down. It's shocking to see how much noise and blurriness unprocessed files have.
By the way, I'm writing this in anger after quitting a seemingly simple photo session I mistakenly thought the P880 could handle. I was wrong. I was wrong to buy this awful product. I wish I never did. I hate it!
If Kodak had told me the truth, I would not have chosen to buy this camera. Here's some honest ad copy they should have used:
"Switches itself off at the touch of a feather!"
"You want Aperture and Shutter priority? You got it! But they don't work. Just try it and you'll understand."
"Auto white balance always errs on the side of sickly yellow!"
"USB 2.0 was standardized in 2001, but we're sticking with USB 1.1!"
"Miss more shots than ever with the powerlessness of Kodak."
"Feel the bitterness."
"You'll eventually want to smash it."
It's hard to believe how many problems this camera has. I bought it specifically because it looked simpler than others. I wanted the manually operated zoom lens to avoid lens mechanism errors plaguing other brands. I wanted aperture priority to set it as desired and simply go out and take nice pictures. The camera failed to live up to my reasonable expectations.
I remember my early weeks with the camera, getting mad at how it consistently made wrong photographic choices. Exposures were regularly blown out or massively underexposed. Colors looked wrong. Things I thought were so easy in the world of Canon point and shoot photography were beyond Kodak's abilities. I never use full Auto mode. It is completely useless in all lighting situations.
Eventually Program mode solved my problems, but I wasted so much time trying and trying to get the camera to simply make decent exposures of well lit subjects that the bitterness, loathing, frustration, and disappointment linger on 3 years later.
The P880 is a tragic product. It's 95% of the way to greatness, but that missing 5% is a constant source of vexation. At least I didn't buy it early at full price.
I intend to destroy the camera eventually. I cannot in good conscience sell it or even give it away to others. That would violate the golden rule, something Kodak would do well to reflect upon.
