Kodak EasyShare M873

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,49292618,00.htm

Reviewed 14 September 2007

Reviewed by Rich Trenholm

The Kodak EasyShare M873 is a super-slim compact camera that crams in 8 megapixels. It has all the typical hallmarks of an affordable compact, such as ISO sensitivity up to 1,600, allowing for digital image stabilisation, a 3x optical zoom, VGA video and a 64mm (2.5-inch) LCD screen.

We tested it to see whether this highly affordable £120 camera holds its own in a crowded market.

Design
The M873 is a snake-hipped 18mm thin at its widest point. The whole thing is so light and slender that it slips well into even the tightest pockets.

The red button on the M873 works with the EasyShare software for one-touch printing, uploading and email

The slider switch to choose between video, scene and modes is fiddly. Usually these are grouped together with playback on a mode wheel, and it would have removed an extra button if they had been kept together here. Equally, the delete function could have been moved to the clickpad, as the dedicated button only works in playback mode and is redundant the rest of the time.

The battery is charged by plugging the camera into the AC adaptor rather than by removing it and placing it into a separate charger. While this may be a more elegant solution, it does mean you have to leave the whole camera out and exposed to possible theft while charging.

Annoyingly, for those who do not own an EasyShare dock, file transfer requires an adaptor to plug a USB cable into the M873's docking slot. That's one more tiny piece of equipment to potentially go missing.

Features
There are various whistles and bells on the M873. You can set the exposure time for up to eight seconds, or use the panorama stitch mode to take three pictures and have them automatically knitted together. A fragment of the previous image appears on screen to aid you in lining up the segments of your panorama. There's also an orientation sensor, that senses which way up you're holding the camera and turns the final picture accordingly.

You get 20 preset scene modes, although the high ISO and digital shake-reduction modes are basically the same. One customisable scene mode is available for saving your own settings.

Unfortunately, that's where the control over your actual photography ends. There isn't even shutter or aperture priority, let alone a manual mode. There's no optical image stabilisation or face detection either.

Performance
The M873 takes about three seconds to start up, with the first picture captured in just over four seconds (without flash). In standard shooting mode and with decent light, the M873 is capable of snapping a picture every two seconds, but tends to take longer if lighting is unfavourable or if the autofocus has to hunt around. Fortunately, the AF is reasonably decisive. Surprisingly, centre-weighted focus isn't much faster than multi-zone.

The no-frills theme continues with the lack of a focus assist lamp for darker conditions. In low light the AF either makes quick decisions or none at all, but when it does lock on it seems to have just defaulted to focusing on the centre of the frame.

The slider switch to choose between video, scene and modes is fiddly

In continuous shooting mode, four pictures are captured in just under three seconds. Unfortunately, four is the limit, or if you're lucky five images followed by a couple of seconds of blue processing screen. Flash is not an option in this mode.

Image quality
Picture quality from the M873 isn't great. Purple fringing is in evidence, and fine detail often comes out smudged, with the appearance of severe softening at the edges of the image. Images were crispest at ISO 100 with the sharpness turned to maximum. The sharpening isn't enough to be intrusive, but does firm up detail at this ISO setting. At higher settings, sharpening only served to highlight the already quite marked speckles of noise.

As on most compacts, noise is a problem for the M873. Noise appears in the darker tones at ISO 400, and at ISO 800 there's noise across all colours. At the maximum ISO 1,600, even in decent lighting, dark tones are rendered a horrible mush of purple and blue speckles. Brown tones were the worst offenders, coming out streaked with sickly yellow. This renders the digital image stabilisation mode next to useless, as it works by increasing the ISO to compensate for a faster shutter speed.

Conclusion
The M873 is extremely pocketable and very easy to use, although this mainly stems from the fact that it doesn't do all that much. Picture quality isn't amazing but if you ignore the noisy higher ISO settings and resign yourself to relying on the flash in low light, it's perfectly possible to take decent snapshots.

At this price, if we can't have more features on the M87, then we'd at least like to see more control over settings. For a similar price, the Fujifilm F31fd has a lower 6.3-megapixel resolution but far superior low-light performance, as well as face detection. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W55 also has a lower resolution but still takes great pictures.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday