Kodak EasyShare C180 review

A budget digicam that sets its aims low

The EasyShare C180 is the latest budget camera from Kodak, and while a select few will raise their eyebrows in mild anticipation, a much larger group will be wondering why they persist. For instance, not that you would expect award-winning designs for a compact camera right down at the bottom of end of the budget scale, but the C180 doesn’t even make an attempt to lure in potential buyers with its aesthetics.

A metallic strip runs along the top plate, with the camera’s ‘3x optical zoom’ engraved into it – hardly anything to shout about in this day and age of digital cameras.

We were further aggrieved by the inclusion of the Flash button up there also, this time protruding slightly in contrast to the power button that sits level with the surface. Not that there are this many camera manufacturers (as far as we are aware), but 99 out of 100 incorporate the flash settings into the D-pad, which means that Kodak’s deviance merely causes confusion for the user.

Joining the D-pad on the back of the C180 is a rather small 2.4-inch LCD screen, which makes it tricky to frame a decent shot. There are four thin buttons adjacent to the black border surrounding the screen, apparently designed to blend in and be inconspicuous, but this defies logic when two of them are the oft-used Playback and Delete buttons. Unfortunately, irritation is increased due to their fiddly nature. The remaining two are allocated to an Information button – which could have helped redeem the C180 by providing useful advice for beginners but instead offers a short cut to the exposure compensation, timer and focus/macro settings – and a Settings button that leads to options for the picture size, burst mode, self timer, colour mode, AF control, Face Detection and Blur Warning settings.

In an attempt to dig deep and find something else positive about the C180, beginners will find a fairly novel feature in the timer settings. Alongside the standard ten-second and two-second settings, there’s a two-picture option, which works in the same way a passport photo booth operates, leaving a few seconds after the first capture to take a second attempt at straightening postures, not blinking at the flash, etc, or for the more adventurous to snap a completely different pose, before the second shot is automatically taken.

The Mode dial continues the theme of both looking and feeling cheap, but nonetheless is the focal point of six different modes. 16 different settings sit under the Scene mode option, so there’s plenty to offer first-timers at least, although a few too many seemed to revolve solely around light (Sunset, Backlight, Candle Light, etc) and therefore a simple ISO adjustment. Following on from that is the obligatory Video mode, which is basic at best and gobbles up memory on the card. The Macro mode is poor, with ‘close-up’ shots starting at 13 centimetres, which may as well be a mile in macro photography, while the Sport setting seems to perform much the same function as the Blur Reduction feature, reducing the effect of moving action.

The aforementioned Blur Reduction is first up under scrutiny, and is actually a fairly useful feature. It reduces subject motion blur enough to be strongly considered when out in the field, which is more than can be said for a lot of the included extras on cheap digital compacts these days. So, at long last, the C180 gives us its first reason to consider buying it. Next is the Auto setting, a function that most users of this camera will use the majority of the time. It seems slow to acclimatise to its settings, and the resulting shots are more often than not unworthy of viewing via the Playback button. Noise is evident from the off, although it’s unclear to begin with whether this is due to the poor quality of the LCD screen, while exposure is often poor, even after making the relevant changes in the menus. The high ISO level (1250) it boasts of doesn’t seem to do a lot in low-light environments; generally, shots were a disappointment, which takes away all the hope that the Blur Reduction setting had just offered.