Kodak EasyShare One review

Image quality
While the Kodak EasyShare One can produce images of sufficient quality for casual snapshots and simple illustrative applications, the photos produced by this 4-megapixel digital camera falls short of similarly priced competitors.

To its benefit, the EasyShare One has a fairly good auto white-balance program, sometimes producing more accurate colours than its user-selectable presets. The colour produced by the camera is a bit on the poster-paint side, though: very saturated and nonadjustable. Dynamic range is also a bit compressed, with easily blown-out highlights.

The sharpness of the lens-sensor combination is acceptable but is marred by too much in-camera processing. Thin white halos along high-contrast edges, as around dark text against a light field, indicate oversharpening and excessive compression. While you can reduce the appearance of halos slightly by decreasing the in-camera sharpening, you can't adjust the compression ratio. Other compression artefacts include blockiness and dithering in some areas of uniform colour.

Some image noise is visible at ISO 80, ISO 100 and ISO 200 but doesn't break away from the pack until ISO 400, the Kodak EasyShare One's highest sensitivity rating. At this speed, graininess increases slightly and demosaicing artefacts, like the yellowish marble pattern that appeared in one picture we took of a piece of paper on a textured wall, become quite apparent. Blooming, in which colour leaks onto backlit objects, is also easily visible under some conditions.

The 36mm-to-108mm lens, with its slowish f/2.8-to-f/4.8 maximum aperture, suffers from some distinct issues, as well. Purple fringing around backlit objects, such as leaves against a sky, is easily visible under normal conditions. Barrel distortion, in which straight lines in the image's edges curve outward, is quite noticeable at the lens' wide end, though the squeezed-in look called pincushioning is hardly apparent at the telephoto end, where it usually appears. Vignetting, in which the corners of an image are darker than the rest of it, is quite noticeable at the wide angle but less so at the telephoto end.

The Kodak EasyShare One is fairly good at avoiding red-eye, though the camera doesn't use its multizone metering and focus capabilities to consistently make smart flash exposures -- off-centre subjects sometimes appear blown out.

The EasyShare One's movie quality is decent, with little of the jaggedness in diagonal lines that many other digital cameras exhibit.

Edited by Lori Grunin
Additional editing by Nick Hide