With a large touchscreen and sharing functionality built-in, this budget compact seems perfect for younger users on a tight budget. The What Digital Camera Kodak Easyshare Touch review digs deeper to see whether it's a winner all round...

Product Overview

Overall rating:

82%

Kodak Easyshare Touch

Overall score:82%
Value:80%
Performance:90%
Image Quality:70%
Design:85%
Features:85%

Pros:

  • Detailed and responsive touch screen, sharing functionality works well, good exposures

Cons:

  • Image quality, fiddly zoom rocker, microSD use

Product:

Kodak Easyshare Touch Review

Manufacturer:

Price as reviewed:

£110.00

Performance & Image Quality

Kodak Easyshare Touch review – Performance

A number of intuitive functions make themselves known throughout the camera’s operation, and this begins right from powering up. Should there be any images on the camera’s internal memory, for example, the camera automatically asks the user if they would like to copy them onto a memory card, whenever one is used for the first time since their capture. Furthermore, a small and discreet bin icon appears after each shot in the corner of the frame, which makes light work of immediately deleting any images you know you won’t want to keep.
Kodak Easyshare Touch sample image
Elsewhere the camera puts in a reasonable performance, although nothing really impresses as much as the interface and LCD screen. It takes the best part of a couple of seconds for the camera to fully ready itself for shooting, while focusing speeds are good but a touch slower than some other cameras around this price, particularly at the zoom’s tele end. There’s also room for improvement with the camera’s zoom operation, as even the most gentle nudging only allows six points over the entire focal range to be selected, including the two extremes.

Things improve in image playback, though. Thanks to the display’s responsiveness it only takes a gentle swipe of the finger to browse through images, and it’s possible to view them by both date and subject. The Share feature also works well, and with the supplied software makes transferring images to both a computer and websites a cinch.

Kodak Easyshare Touch review – Image Quality

Kodak Easyshare Touch sample image

With the user experience scoring brownie points all round, it’s a pity that image quality is only really suited for casual snapshots viewed at small-print or web-friendly sizes. Viewed at 100% the camera’s aggressive processing can be easily seen, with noise reduction turning details to mush and slight oversharpening giving subjects unnatural outlines, even when shooting at the lowest sensitivities in optimum conditions. Slight distortions from the camera’s lens are noticeable but overall they’re well controlled, and while chromatic aberrations are also noticeable across edges of details, the Touch is by no means alone here.

If you’re not looking at images so closely, there’s less to disappoint. The metering system does well to keep exposures balanced, with harshly-lit situations the main culprits to forcing highlights to blow, although the camera relies on its flash more than expected which isn’t always appropriate (particularly for close-up subjects). Colours are pleasing if a touch pale, and the white balance does a sterling job most of the time, although certain images taken during the test displayed inaccurate colour casts – even in daylight – and ambient exposures of the same subject occasionally differed in colour and white balance between shots.

Kodak Easyshare Touch sample image

  1. 1. Kodak Easyshare Touch review - Features
  2. 2. Performance & Image Quality
  3. 3. Value & Verdict
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