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By Kevin Wu Li, CNET Asia
May 30, 2006

Kodak's V-series lineup easily outshines its brethren with its trendy design and the EasyShare V603 too didn't disappoint us in that aspect. While aiming to maintain its signature user-friendliness, the camera manufacturer attempts to further enhance the new model with more innovative features which makes sharing extremely simple.

Design
The V603 is small, compact and measures 92 x 50 x 21mm. It's either we're getting stronger by the day or the camera feels very light. When fully loaded with a Lithium-ion battery and memory card, the unit weighs only 138g which is comparable with Sony's ultraslim Cyber-shot DSC-T7.

The layout of the buttons on the V603 is very well-organized but we would have liked more dedicated buttons on the shooter. That said, we had no problems deciphering the different keys and their functions. A Share button on the back of the camera allows immediate sharing of images while the Favorite control lets the user access his favorite images easily.

We're nitpicking, but the buttons are pretty tiny and it can get quite frustrating especially when changing settings while trying to hold the camera steady.

The dock connector (USB, A/V out) is positioned at the bottom of the camera and the slot for the memory card is on the right edge of the unit where the strap eyelet is. What we really don't like about the design of the compartment is that it doesn't come with a cover, so your card protrudes slightly out of the unit. It makes insertion easier, but there's also a high tendency to dislodge the memory card.

The menu system is easy to understand and we encountered little problems maneuvering the different options on the graphical user interface.

Features
The Kodak EasyShare V603 is a 6.1-megapixel shooter using a Schneider-Kreuznach C-Variogon 3x (36mm to 108mm, 35mm equivalent) optical zoom lens. In addition, the V603 has a 230k-pixel, 2.5-inch LCD screen that displays sharp images.

There is a wide selection of shooting modes to choose from: Portrait, Night Landscape, Macro, and Sport to the more customized Fireworks, Beach and Snow. For digital photography amateurs, there is an auto scene selection mode that lets the camera decide the most appropriate scene mode to use. Enthusiasts won't be looking at this camera since it doesn't offer manual controls.

The shooter comes with selectable sensitivity settings from ISO 80 to ISO 800, with ISO 800 available only when taking pictures at 1.8 megapixels.

The V603 records MPEG-4 compressed video with audio capture and playback capabilities. In addition, video capture also comes with digital image stabilization and autofocus.

You can do basic editing of images and videos with Kodak's proprietary Perfect Touch technology including extracting a frame from a video, splitting a video, and making a video action print. We feel it's not only the quantity of actions, but also the ease with which it can be performed.

This EasyShare comes with an internal memory of 32MB but you'd probably invest in a high-capacity Secure Digital card if you intend to shoot more than a few pictures. For our tests, we used Imation's high-speed 1GB SD card.

Performance
Startup and shutdown time for the V603 were relatively fast averaging around 1.8 seconds. Time to first shot took slightly under 3 seconds with flash. We managed to shoot every 1.5 seconds thereafter without flash. With force flash, it took only a little longer at about 1.7 seconds.

Viewing our images was a breeze and nearly instantaneous as we scrolled through our collection. Battery life was average allowing us to take about 250 frames before we saw red on the status indicator.

Image Quality
The EasyShare V603 fared reasonably well by producing decent, saturated colors. In low-light conditions, the camera gave us well-processed shots with night mode on. Noise was well-controlled up to ISO 400, but at the maximum sensitivity setting of ISO 800, noise was easily evident.

We also noticed slight barrel distortion at the wide end of the zoom. However, we liked the Backlight setting in the scene modes which reduced flaring in our pictures.

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