Kodak EasyShare M200 Digital Camera Review

The 10MP Kodak EasyShare Mini M200 is just about the most compact, lightest, and least complicated digital cameras you will discover.

Made for individuals taking pictures of their buddies and posting them to social networks without a huge concern regarding picture quality, it really is a superb digital camera for the price tag. Be advised: it does not offer image stabilizing, therefore, except for when you utilize a tripod, or fantastic lighting environments, you may require the flash or you are going to find yourself with really blurry pictures.

Design
Measuring 2"H by 3.4"W by 0.7"D and with a weight of 3.5oz, it should fit conveniently in practically any pocket or purse. When you have bigger hands, its dimensions may become an issue - your thumb may commonly wander over the top of the LCD panel, as well as the digital camera being somewhat challenging to hold sometimes.

The Kodak EasyShare Mini M200 is available in purple, red and blue variations. The digital camera's front side is really shiny, loaded with the camera lens, flash, along with a compact mirror for self-shots. You'll find buttons located on the top and backside of the digital camera, committed to changing the most common modes - flipping from video clip to pictures, toggling the flash, and so forth. This is a wise decision by Kodak, since many individuals purchasing the Mini will likely snap photos in automatic mode and only toggle the flash.

The camera lens provides 3x zoom, beginning at 29mm and stretching to 87mm, along with an equivalent aperture of f/3.5-f/5.9. It may not sound really remarkable, however, it's going to perform nice in many scenarios. The viewing screen built into the back of the Mini is a 2.5" display which is filled with 230,000 dots, and that's common point and shoot digital camera resolution, yet even better, because the screen is small sized, it appears sharper than usual. The half-inch size reduction (compared to many cameras' 3" screen) will cause an impact and will result in a considerable amount of scrolling through menus along with a reasonable amount of squinting at pictures.

All on-screen menus fall under several segments - Capture, that handles all the things associated with photo capturing, and Setup with regard to operations such as altering the time and date. Apart from the button designed for picture mode toggling, you'll find not very many controls on the digital camera: a zoom modification, a pair of Menu buttons, stand alone Playback and Erase buttons, and a Share button. Kodak's sharing features are among the camera's leading qualities, enabling you to earmark pics and vids for distribution to sites like Flickr, Facebook or MySpace, YouTube and others - and whenever you link up your camera, they will be conveniently delivered to their specific locations.

Performance
Labeling the EasyShare Mini "speedy" is somewhat of a stretch, however, its picture taking results seriously is not poor for a digital camera under $100. It will start up and snap a photo within the 3 second mark, and you will wait around 3 seconds among picture taking. You can find quicker compact digital cameras, even though the Mini will not be considered notably sluggish. Other stuff will be slower: A few of the User Interface features are a bit slow while you're scrolling or pressing a button, and viewing of photos and video clips is somewhat slow, as well.

Imatest testing was utilized to gather data regarding image quality. Imatest's initial test is image sharpness, calculated in lines per photo height. The EasyShare Mini scored a reasonable 1,664 lines, and that is a good sharpness result, particularly for a low cost camera.

Imatest in addition measures noise from numerous ISO sensitivities, determining the camera's low-light capturing potential. When there is greater than 1.5% noise within a photo, that photo is going to be noticeably noisy or grainy. The EasyShare Mini's configurations simply will go up to ISO 1000 - a huge warning sign which means this may not be a digital camera you ought to operate inside, without using flash. On the other hand, it will remain beneath the 1.5% limit with each picture.

You will find there's a set-back to this shockingly fine performance: regardless of its decent numbers, you'll probably find difficulties capturing usable photos in anything aside from ideal lighting. Which is due to the fact the camera does not have image stabilizing. Except in cases where you'll be snapping shots in superb light or employing a tripod and capturing still subjects, even the smallest movements could ruin your pictures and cause them to be blurry. Utilizing a flash will help minimize this issue, and when it comes to the EasyShare Mini, it is certainly your sole solution with regard to anything but vibrantly lit up shooting conditions.

Video shooting is not so perfect with the EasyShare Mini, and that's bothersome for a digital camera that'll connect so conveniently to YouTube and other similar sites, yet not unexpected for a camera in this price range. The camera records video only at VGA quality, so high definition video will not happen. On a positive not, it offers auto-focus accessible while video recording, in addition to digital zoom, although you don't really want to use it as it will lessen the quality of the video. Video will be recorded as MPEG files, that can be naturally published to a lot of video sites.

The EasyShare Mini works with SDXC memory cards, that happen to be backwards compatible with SD memory cards.

There's even a mini USB slot for linking the camera together with your laptop, as well as for charging the battery, and that's good because you won't need an extra charger. You won't find an HDMI port intended for playing pictures and video via your high definition TV, but you shouldn't expect it due to the camera's cost or its video-recording functions.