Kodak EasyShare P712 review

Overall, colours looked natural and well saturated, and exposures were accurate with plenty of detail in both highlights and shadows. The auto white balance did a very good job of neutralising colours under our lab's tungsten lights, retaining just the barest hint of warmth. The tungsten preset yielded slightly cool images, while the manual white balance produced almost perfectly neutral results. Fringing was minimal but still present, mostly in the corners of our field-test images.

Image quality
Unfortunately, like most Kodak cameras, the EasyShare P712 produces noisy images. Even at ISO 64, some off-colour speckles were visible in our test images. While this noise increased at both ISO 80 and ISO 100, it was still well under control, yielding acceptable images. By ISO 200, noise was obviously noticeable with larger splotches in darker colours, especially blues. Though the noise softened some finer details, the images still produced decent prints. At ISO 400, the noise was rampant, making all but 100x150mm (4x6-inch) prints unusable. Given that this camera is geared towards more advanced users, who are more apt to shoot in darker conditions, it's disappointing to find this much noise, though we did appreciate the versatility of the 1/3-stop ISO increments.

If you're not bothered by noisy images and slightly sluggish performance, the Kodak EasyShare P712's many other merits make it an attractive megazoom. If you're more picky, you may want to sacrifice a megapixel and try Canon's PowerShot S3 IS.

Shooting speed
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Typical shot-to-shot time

Time to first shot

Shutter lag (typical)

Canon PowerShot S3 IS

1.7 

1.5 

0.4 

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ4

1.1 

2.8 

0.5 

Kodak EasyShare P712

1.6 

2.9 

0.6 

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7

1.5 

2.8 

0.6 

Sony Cyber Shot DSC-H5

1.8 

2.7 

0.6