Kodak EasyShare LS743

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,39186584,00.htm

Reviewed 13 January 2005

Reviewed by David D. Busch

Snap photographers who want good image quality and ease of operation (and won't miss manual controls) will love the Kodak EasyShare LS743, a slim and portable 4-megapixel model. While its zoom range is limited to 2.8x, close focusing, a good burst mode, and extralong battery life make this a versatile camera, especially for photographers whose enthusiasm for picture-taking exceeds their technical skills.

The panorama layout of its 109 by 30 by 48mm all-metal body lets the 184g Kodak EasyShare LS743 slip easily into the narrowest of pockets, but its wide shape and the placement of the shutter release and zoom controls make it awkward to use this camera one-handed. For best balance, brace the left side of the LS743 with one hand, place your right index finger over the top on to the shutter release, and let your right thumb find the zoom toggle on the back panel. Those with large hands may find the grip awkward.

Top-mounted controls include a power-on button illuminated by a blue LED that's bright enough to read by, and a flash-mode key. There is also a rotating wheel that cycles through the main camera modes, which are displayed on the back panel. When the icon for the mode you want (Auto, Portrait, Close-Up, Scenes, Video, or Favorite Review) is illuminated, you press the jog wheel to activate it. Selecting Scenes produces an LCD menu of choices such as Night or Sport. Because the mode indicators are each illuminated by a flashing red LED and described on the LCD, it's easy to choose these settings under the dimmest ambient illumination.

The back panel is clean and well laid out. The 46mm (1.8-inch) LCD is centred and flanked on the left by Delete, Menu, Review, and Share buttons and on the right by a four-way controller pad that rocks up, down, left, and right to navigate menus or controls and is pressed to activate a selection. The zoom toggle is concentric with the four-way button.

Shooting options other than flash mode require a trip to the well-designed menu system, where you can make adjustments to exposure compensation, white balance, ISO setting, focus zone, and metering mode. You'll also find the burst mode and self-timer there. Unfortunately, most settings other than picture quality return to their defaults once you turn off the camera. A second menu layer invokes a setup menu for more permanent settings, such as picture review, sound volume, and date stamps.

The upper-left corner of the back panel includes the optical viewfinder and a 'ready' LED that turns green when autofocus and exposure are set and flashes when an image is being stored.

Although the Kodak EasyShare LS743 sports a 2.8x zoom lens instead of the more common 3x type, you probably won't notice the difference. The 36mm (35mm film-camera equivalent) wide-angle view is broad enough for most indoor photography, and the 100mm (equivalent) telephoto setting actually shaves just 8mm from what you'd get with a full 3x magnification. The Schneider-Kreuznach C-Variogon lens name lends some cachet and nostalgia for film-camera veterans but, more importantly, focuses down to 51mm at the wide-angle setting in macro mode and 305mm at full telephoto.

While there are no manual exposure settings other than exposure compensation to ±2EV in 1/2EV steps, you can customise how the camera makes its decisions by selecting multipattern, centre-weighted, or spot metering, as well as multizone or centre-zone TTL autofocus. You can also choose from three white-balance settings and set ISO from 80 to 800. (The camera uses only ISO 80 to 160 in automatic ISO mode.) Shutter speeds up to 1/1,400 second are selected by the camera, and there's also a Long Time exposure option that specifies exposures from 0.5 to 16 seconds.

The nine scene modes (Night, Night Portrait, Sport, Landscape, Snow, Beach, Party, Self Portrait, and Museum) do a good job of optimising shutter speed and aperture for specific types of shooting. The Sports setting is particularly fun to use when coupled with the camera's 3-frame-per-second, 6-shot burst mode. There's also the increasingly common automatic picture-rotation feature that orientates your vertical and horizontal shots correctly for display.

One cool feature is the Share button, which lets you slot pictures into an in-camera photo album for viewing as 'favourites' or to tag them for printing. You can also share your pictures with as many as 32 email addresses, marking them in the camera, then sending the shots automatically when downloading from the camera to your computer's EasyShare software. While reviewing or tagging pictures, you can magnify the images up to 4x on the LCD.

Flash options are rather basic, with only automatic, fill (always on), red-eye, and off available, and flash range is limited to about 3m at the wide-angle setting and a mere 1.8m in telephoto mode.

Budding film directors will find the LS743 a poor substitute for a camcorder, with 640x480-pixel clips captured at a jerky 13fps. The length of your movies is limited only by available memory; a 512MB SD card can record more than half an hour of sound and motion.

Photographers who like to snap consecutive shots quickly will be pleased with the Kodak EasyShare LS743's performance. If an unexpected photo opportunity pops up, this camera is good to go, whether you're reviewing photos on the LCD, making an adjustment in a menu, or simply not paying attention. If the camera's on, just bring it to your eye and click away. After the first shot, you can take additional pictures every 1.8 seconds (2.5 seconds using the flash). Or you can switch to burst mode and take 6 pictures in less than 2 seconds.

Unfortunately, if the camera is not on you'll have to wait about 6 seconds for it to power up. Shutter lag was decent at 0.7 second under high-contrast lighting conditions but quite long under low-contrast lighting, where the nonassisted autofocus thrashed around for 1.7 seconds before locking in.

Kodak touts its 'indoor/outdoor' LCD, and it was usable as a viewfinder outdoors, even under direct sunlight. Because the LCD shows 100 percent of the picture, it's a better choice for close-ups than the small, non-parallax-corrected optical viewfinder, which displays only 80 percent of the image and doesn't have dioptre adjustment.

Purple fringing that showed up around the highlights of many of our pictures was the most glaring defect to mar the otherwise good image quality produced by the Kodak EasyShare LS743. Pictures were generally sharp and detailed. Colours, especially flesh tones, were realistic in most cases, although some tended to have, if anything, a bit too much saturation. We detected a slight blue cast in some photos, and although exposures were generally good, there was a tendency for some highlights to blow out. Noise was not a problem at lower ISO settings but reared its ugly head at ISO 400 to 800. The highest sensitivity setting is available only at the lowest-resolution Good setting, so you probably won't be using it much, anyway.

Edited by: Aimee Baldridge
Additional editing by: Tom Espiner