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I purchased this camera when my Kodak Z1275 quit working. I have small grand kids, so NOT having a working camera is not an option.
I wanted a small easy-to-carry camera with HD video recording capabilities. I had seen the commercials for the Coolpix S70 and it looked like a good candidate for me. I ordered it on-line form Amazon and it arrived at my home in a reasonable amount of time.
I put it through its paces after charging the battery for a few hours. The on-screen display was intuitive and easy to use. Pictures can be taken using a button on top of the camera or by tapping the touch-screen. The scene selection arsenal is adequate for anything I need to do with a camera these days. The 5x optical zoom is a nice addition to have in such a small camera. The quality of the still pictures HD videos is very good. The battery life is surprising long for a camera that has no optical view-finder (the screen has to be turned on to take pictures).
To sum things up - this camera is small, well built and captures high quality images.
I'm very pleased with every aspect of this camera, and highly recommend it.
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After having used my Kodak Slice camera for a few hours here are my initial thoughts: overall I like the camera very much, and imagine I'll be using it a great deal, BUT it's not perfect.
Positives: I really like the look of the camera. (I got it in black.) The front of the camera is rather featureless but attractive in a utilitarian sort of way. The back is dominated by a very large touchscreen. The top buttons are raised slightly and surrounded by translucent plastic that lights up and blinks when the camera is charging or connected to a computer. (It works with both Macs and PCs, so Apple owners need not worry.) It'll comfortably fit in most pockets. It's not as ultraslim as some other cameras in the price range, but overall I very much like how it feels when holding it.
I find most cameras' controls frustrating: It's never immediately obvious how to do simple things like turn off the flash, adjust scene settings, etc. I eventually figure it out, but everyone seems to do it a little differently, and figuring out which little switch to push in which direction is tedious. I really like the Slice's touchscreen: it does almost everything except take the picture and zoom in/out. It's nicely responsive: not as good as the screens on more expensive smartphones like iPhones or the better Droids, but nevertheless does the job well. It's size is wonderful for previewing pictures you just took, and the layout of the menus and controls are obvious for the most part.
One thing that may be confusing to some is the idea of the 'Slice Album'. When Kodak refers to '5000 pictures' on your camera, they're talking about the small versions of every photo you take that get retained in the camera's memory in what they call the 'Slice Album'. These are NOT full photos, but rather scaled down versions that remain on the camera. Every time you take a picture and don't immediately delete it, the camera will not only save the full-sized image in memory, but also save the smaller version into the 'Slice Album', where it will stay indefinitely. Eventually when you transfer the image off the camera and delete it, the full-sized copy goes away, but the smaller 'Slice Album' version does NOT. There's a small review button to the left of the other buttons on the top of the camera, and when you press that, even when the camera is off, you will see all the photos in your Slice Album and search by tag or look through them sequentially. The benefit of this is that your camera is always carrying a copy of the last several thousand photos you've taken in your Slice Album, and they're always there to show someone from your camera. Think of it as a gallery of large 'thumbnails' always available to show people. Another nice thing about the Slice Album is that you can also tag your photos in various ways (location, keyword, people), and have the 1000s of photos available to show someone as long as you have your camera with you, and you can quickly search via tags for that one photo or set of photos you want to show them.
You really do want to get some microSD memory to give yourself some 'legroom' for the full-sized photos (I found some cheap class 6 Transcend microsd cards on Amazon for about each, so I got two and now have 16gb of space, and since I have two cards I can use one for everyday and one for special trips, etc..) Overall the Slice Album is a very clever idea, but Kodak isn't doing themselves any favors by not describing it more thoroughly, and leading people to think the camera stores thousands of full-sized photos, which is NOT what it is doing.
I'd say image quality is very good, but not excellent. (Keep in mind I just take casual photos, so I'm no judge of professional quality). Photos aren't always quite as sharp as I'd like when using its autofocus, but the colors are nice, and the 14MP is more than enough for my needs. It's easy to switch into video mode, and other than the camera occasionally struggling to maintain focus I liked the quality. Facial recognition seemed to work well, and image stabilization also worked well: I didn't notice much blurring to my motions, and I'm not always the steadiest when it comes to taking pictures. (In fact, i'm a bit of a klutz...)
I like the idea of the 'Share Button' a lot, but the implementation is a mixed bag: on the good side, it's pretty slick that I can set up several share destinations (facebook, flickr, the Kodak Gallery, and e-mail addresses of my choice amongst others), and then for each picture I've taken I can quickly get to a sharing screen and check off what destination(s) to send it to. Then, the next time I sync to my PC/Mac it will pull the photos/videos over to the computer, and then send them off to their appropriate destinations. I was able to easily send photos to Facebook, Flickr, and the Kodak Gallery with little effort. I was also able to set up e-mail destinations for my TwitPic and TwitVid accounts, and shared pictures and videos with similar ease.
Cons:
As mentioned above, some pictures focus was less sharp than I'd want when using autofocus, and in videos it would blur then re-focus a little more often than I'd expect.
While the Share Button app is a great idea, there's still a few ways it should be fleshed out: For starters, where's Twitter?!? I set up TwitPic and TwitVid e-mail addresses manually, but it would be nice to have Twitter as a pre-set destination just like Facebook and the others. On my first batch of synced photos, one that I had marked to send to my TwitPic e-mail didn't make it through, even though the app claimed all photos were sent successfully. A second batch were delivered to their destinations fine, including TwitPic. You also can't specify what message goes along with your photos or videos, they just get a generic message like 'New pictures from my KODAK camera'. Being able to specify a custom comment would make this much more flexible.
They already have a firmware update out, but you must have a microsd card and a pc or netbook that can write to it, in order to install the update. You download it to your PC/laptop, unzip it (a step they fail to mention in their instructions!!!), and then move the *unzipped file* onto your microsd card. (The Transcend microsd cards I got came with a standard SD adapter so I could insert them into my laptop's reader.) Once you have the file on the microsd card you insert it into the camera and then the next time you turn it on the camera will ask if you want to update the firmware. It would be better if you didn't have to go through all that to do a firmware update, and could just do it via the USB connection like many other devices do. But at least they ARE providing firmware updates, so that's a good thing!
Summary:
Overall, I think the Slice is a solid camera that is easy to use with nice styling, and that (with some room for improvement) makes it easy to share photos to multiple destinations. At its list price there's lots of very strong competition that give it a good run for its money, but at the price Amazon and others are currently selling it at, it's a more compelling product that I'm very happy with.
