Kodak EasyShare-One

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By Shams Tarek, CNET.com
Nov 15, 2005

Although it took nine months from announcement to shipment, the Kodak EasyShare-One arrived with its promised 3-inch touch-screen LCD and Wi-Fi transfer capabilities. With them, the camera opens up genuinely original possibilities for travelers, business people, and government agencies that need instant photo sharing. But all is not perfect in Kodak's wireless utopia. While the EasyShare-One is great for sharing photos, it's not so great at shooting them. The user interface, optimized for maximum simplicity, can be slow and annoying for anyone unwilling to settle for complete automation. The poor image quality further compounds our disappointment.

Editors' note:

This review is based on the EasyShare-One tested in the US. We will update this review when the unit arrives in Singapore during the first quarter of 2006.

Design
The Kodak EasyShare-One is an attractive, well-built, compact camera made from high-quality brushed metal accented in white. The camera's control layout and menu interface, however, could use some improvement. Designed for snapshooters, the interface favors automation and doesn't allow you to change many settings. While this might work for an insurance agent at an accident scene or a foreman documenting a construction site, it's not as suitable for someone who may need to change a few settings to get a better shot.

Changing settings can be slow and annoying. You access them mostly through a 3-inch LCD using either the touch screen or a four-way directional pad. Adjusting common parameters such as ISO sensitivity and white balance requires digging into the setup menu; changing from Auto ISO to ISO 400 requires a whopping 13 button presses!

The only time-saving controls on the Kodak EasyShare-One are Flash and Share buttons. All of the buttons are small and fairly recessed; they're difficult to trip accidentally but equally difficult to activate without some nimble fingerwork.

Many of the icons are too small and too close to the edge of the screen to use your fingers, forcing you to use the small stylus nestled in the side of the camera--at least until you lose it. Most of the icons make immediate sense and don't require a trip to the manual, but some are more opaque. A stack of two offset rectangles, which usually indicates a continuous-drive mode, instead controls stored album names. To change the drive mode, you press the shots-remaining icon. Furthermore, adjusting exposure is a tedious process. Rather than a Windows-style slider control, you must cycle through 13 one-third-stop increments. If you miss your stop, you must cycle through them again.

The Kodak EasyShare-One's big LCD flips and twists on a hinge on the side of the camera. You can flip it forward for self-portraits and timer shots, down to hold the camera above your head, or against the camera body to protect it. However, you can't flip it up to shoot with the camera at or below your waist.

There is one potential silver lining to the EasyShare-One's interface woes: Because it's entirely menu driven, in theory Kodak should be able to update it with a software download. While Kodak plans no such update at the moment, it remains an option.

Features
While the Kodak EasyShare-One excels at sharing pictures over the Internet, those who want manual control during shooting will be disappointed.

When it comes to sharing photos, the EasyShare-One is almost like a minicomputer, with multiple options at its disposal. Primarily, you can upload your images to KodakGallery.com (formerly Ofoto.com) directly from the camera via a Wi-Fi hot spot. You can also email thumbnails of selected pictures, including links to the full photos in your Gallery page, to one or more recipients. Finally, you can even use the camera to browse your friends' KodakGallery.com pages.

In practice, the Kodak EasyShare-One doesn't incorporate the same universal hotspot connection that a notebook or a PDA may have. While it works seamlessly with home and office networks as well as the T-Mobile (in US) access zones found in many coffee shops and other public places, it doesn't work with some public networks that require you to click a user agreement within a Web browser--the type you find in hotels, for example, or Wi-Fi networks such as the one in New York City's Bryant Park. While Kodak promises a firmware update soon to upgrade the camera to the WEP security protocol as well as support for a faster 802.11x Wi-Fi protocol--it is only 802.11b now--Kodak tells us a fix for the user-agreement problem isn't in the works right now.

The EasyShare-One can also transfer images directly to a PC using Wi-Fi and can print wirelessly to Kodak's EasyShare Printer Dock Plus Series 3, provided you spring for a Kodak Wi-Fi Card (the camera comes with its own). Wireless printing doesn't require a computer after a one-time setup using a USB cable.

As for photography tools, the Kodak EasyShare-One is fine for a snapshooter who only uses cameras in full automatic mode. For that user, Kodak includes multiple scene modes complete with little sample photos and written descriptions, including the usual portrait, macro, and landscape settings.

Those who like to adjust settings themselves will find that the camera has a large number of notable omissions in its feature set. You cannot adjust JPEG compression, and the only white-balance settings are Auto, Daylight, Tungsten, and Fluorescent. You can't manually set slow-sync flash, focus, or adjust colors. You can adjust sharpness, however, and there are multizone and more targeted focus and exposure modes.

For those wanting to capture moving images, there is a 640 x 480-pixel, 24fps MPEG-4 QuickTime movie mode with zoom and autofocus capabilities.