Kodak EasyShare Z950 Digital Camera Review

Using the Z950

The specifications of the Kodak EasyShare Z950 are impressive. It is a 12-megapixel camera with a 1/2.33-inch CCD sensor, and a Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon 10x optical zoom lens.

This Kodak has 17 scene modes, including high ISO, portrait, night portrait, landscape, night landscape, flower, sunset, backlight, candle light, museum, text, beach, snow, fireworks, children, self portrait, and stage, as well as a panoramic mode. It also has a special fully automatic mode, called Smart Capture that analyzes the scene and picks the appropriate settings including focus, exposure, and ISO. It uses it Smart Capture processing to reduce noise and adjust the dynamic range. We found this setting to be very good. It helps the user get the proper settings and is amazingly accurate.

The Z950 offers one thing not commonly found on compact cameras of this class. It has the Z950 has full manual settings for aperture, shutter priority, and manual modes. This will allow a budding photographer to tinker with their own settings, while relying on the auto modes whenever they like.

The small User Guide that comes with the camera gives you a useful tour of the camera and its functionality. To get a full view of what this camera can do, you will want to access the online User’s Manual.

The on-screen information is easy to navigate and the settings are easy to change as shown in Figure 10. A press on the Info button lets you eliminate the on-screen information. Another press lets it return it to the screen with a histogram. A third press eliminates the histogram, but keeps the other information. You can use the jog dial to choose and change the settings on the bottom of the screen. You can use the menu button and the jog dial to change the settings at the top of the screen. It is a system that can be learned quite quickly.

Figure 10: On-screen information.

The Z950 also has face detection and good image stabilization. The macro mode works well, but it can only take pics up to 6cm away. So if you are looking for closer picture taking, you will have to look elsewhere. The Z950 offers 5 color modes: High Color, Natural Color, Low Color, Black & White and Sepia.

As might be expected in a camera of this quality all photos are taken jpeg format. The Z950 has a limited burst mode that can handle 3 shots. It works, but is very limited and somewhat slow.

As a matter of fact, slowness is the biggest drawback of this camera. Every time you turn the camera on you get a screen that says “reading memory card” and a delay of about 8 seconds. While this might not sound like a long time, when you are trying to catch an action shot, it can seem like an eternity. Once the camera warms up it can take a few fairy quick photos, but then will again start to lag again and display “processing.”

Overall, however, the Kodak Z950 takes very good pictures. The color representation is very good as are the details. The noise level is lower than most other camera in this class, even at high ISOs, which is a big plus. The ISO can be manually set from 100 to 1,600. The lens created a small amount of barrel distortion in wide angle shots, but this was so slight that many people won’t even notice it.

The HD video on the Kodak Z950 seemed to be an afterthought by the manufacturer. One nice feature is that you can zoom when taking movies, but we got some frame drops when zooming and/or when panning. The camera shoots HD video at 720p (1280×720) video at 30fps in the MPEG-4 format. However, the auto-focus doesn’t work too well during the movie taking process, so there is sometimes a little blurring. Audio recording is clear, but it is monaural only.

If you want to use this camera for movie-taking, we would recommend putting it on a tripod and moving very slowly. If you want a still camera but want to take a lot of videos with it, you will want to look at a different camera.

Kodak says that a fully charged Z950 can take about 300 photos and our testing came very close to this estimate. We did, however, have trouble with the charging cable. When plugged into the camera, it didn’t always start charging. We found that we had to jiggle the plug to get it situated just right before it would charge. Had this been a camera that we purchased for everyday use, this would have been enough to either return the camera or call Kodak for a replacement cable