SmartHouse StaffThe box is a dangerous thing for any technology company. If your designer’s thoughts get stuck inside it, all that follows is evolutionary product after evolutionary product.
KODAK EASYSHARE-ONE
RRP$849 | www.kodak.com.au
Consumers get bored, you get bored, the products start to suffer, and ultimately it all comes crashing down around you.
With its EasyShare-one, Kodak’s proved it has a healthy fear of all things box-like – it’s created the most exciting camera we’ve seen for some time: a camera with a penchant for all things wireless.
Wireless tech means that after a hard day’s shooting you can upload your images to your computer at the touch of a button or, even better, upload them to the internet from a WiFi hotspot. To us, organising online photo albums from the comfort of a pub sounds like very good news indeed.
We love the EasyShare-one, primarily because it has the potential to be wireless and wireless things, as we all know, are brilliant.
Another brilliant feature of the Kodak is its viewfinder. OK, we’ve got swivelly screens coming out of every orifice, and while the finder is three inches big, it’s hardly innovative. But what is smart, however, is that this viewfinder is touch-sensitive and comes with a stylus. This makes organising photos and internet albums easier than a jaunt round the park.
So it’s user-friendly, but is the camera any good? It covers all the quality bases: 4MP CCD, Schneider-Kreuznach optics and a 3x optical zoom in a chassis just over 10cm wide and less than 3cm deep. It also shoehorns in a 30fps VGA movie mode, 6-shot 2fps burst setting, 3.3x digital zoom and more picture modes than you could ever possibly think about needing.
The final touch that marks the EasyShare-one out among many a competitive compact is its built-in 256MB of storage. Compared to the 10MB-odd that most compacts sport, this is obviously good news. It also means you’re less likely to need that SDIO slot for memory expansion, so you can be WiFied up at all times.
But if you do want to expand, the EasyShare will support and catalogue up to 1500 stored images. That leaves it entirely up to you to imagine all the possibilities.