Kodak EasyShare P880 review

Image quality
Photo quality is also mixed with the Kodak EasyShare P880. The camera's images are good enough for snapshots, but close inspection reveals numerous flaws that discriminating enthusiasts would find unacceptable.

While the lens-sensor combination yields sharp images with warm colour rendition, the camera has a tendency to underexpose many shots, especially those with tricky backlighting. In many other situations in which the exposure seems fine, the highlights blow out very easily, giving frames the tonally limited look of a camcorder.

While pictures look very clean at ISO 50, starting at ISO 100 we spotted the yellow, marblised pattern that typifies poor demosaicing, a postprocessing artefact. And noise becomes obtrusive at ISO 200. Surprisingly, ISO 800 and 1,600 don't seem to be as noisy, but that may be because those frames are no bigger than 0.8 megapixels.

As for lens characteristics, the EasyShare P880 exhibits strong vignetting -- darkening of corners -- at the 24mm wide angle, even at the smallest aperture of f/8, where this problem is usually eradicated. We even noticed some at the longest focal length with a wide-open aperture. Unsurprisingly, there is also a great deal of barrel distortion at this focal length, making straight lines curve outwards at the edges of a frame. But it's especially bad in this model because it's asymmetrical and it's throughout the entire frame, not just the edges. Pincushion distortion, the curving in of straight lines at telephoto length, is practically nonexistent. Chromatic aberration, the purple or green fringing around backlit objects, showed up where we expected it but wasn't too extreme.

There are some other noticeable processing flaws that also reveal themselves upon close inspection. Strong white or black halos appear along most high-contrast edges, suggesting a crude sharpening algorithm, and diagonal lines are often jaggy when viewed at 100 per cent. Unfortunately, shooting in TIFF or even raw format doesn't remedy these problems in any significant way.

Edited by Lori Grunin
Additional editing by Kate Macefield