8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
Bad Images By Today's Standards
Date of Review: Jul 19, 2005
The Bottom Line: This is not a BAD camera, per-se. It just wasn't up to my standards. Tons of features but noisy pics. It's a trade-off, I guess.
My sister received this camera as a wedding present from our aunt and uncle. They told me to demo the camera and return it if the pictures don't look good. The camera was returned.
I determine how good a digital camera is by putting it in the most grueling conditions. To me, this means low/no light flash photography. This may seem "unfair" but since most consumers use cameras in the worst conditions.
I have recommended Kodak cameras to a friend and a colleague in the past (the Kodak DX4330 and the CX7530) because the cameras are easy to use and the images look good. Not the C330. Pictures from my old Olympus Camedia D-360L looked better than this (if only it were 4 MP I would have kept it.)
The images of the C330 suffered from too much noise and a lack of focus (or lack of sharpness in the lens.) Perhaps I had a defective camera but from what I saw I was none to pleased with this brand new 4 megapixel camera. You can view a few samples here (I don't know if Epinions allows linking but I'll try anyway):
http://rarshow.com/epinions/kodakc330/kodakc330fullres1.JPG
http://rarshow.com/epinions/kodakc330/kodakc330fullres2.JPG
http://rarshow.com/epinions/kodakc330/kodakc330fullres3.JPG
Judge for yourself. And yes, that is my messy desk and dirty room ;-). It looks to me like the camera's processor is a poor JPEG compressor that adds noise to all the wrong places. The last photo at ISO 80 wasn't even too sharp in my opinion.
It also took too long to save images to the memory card. This I found really frustrating. And the autofocus didn't always find the proper place to focus. The flash range on this camera wasn't very impressive either (less than 14 feet at the highest ISO, by estimate).
This camera has a lot of good features and a decent amount of manual controls (although none for shutter speed or aperture but that's to be expected on a $180 camera). It has plenty of scene modes and the controls are easy to use. The lack of sound in the movie mode was a bit of a disappointment though.
This camera was replaced with the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-S40 which cost the exact same as this camera but delivers with better image quality, lightning fast autofocus/image saving and a movie mode that looks real good. I'd recommend this or a Canon PowerShot A520 if you can spend a little extra money. Samples (for a future review) can be found at:
http://rarshow.com/epinions/sonydscs40/sonyfullres1.JPG
http://rarshow.com/epinions/sonydscs40/sonyfullres2.JPG
http://rarshow.com/epinions/sonydscs40/sonyfullres3.JPG
(no sharpening)
