Kodak EasyShare M873 review

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