Kodak P880

Reviewed December 2005

Test Photos

STILL LIFE PHOTO

This subject is photographed in a room that has a mix of fluorescent and incandescent light, but which is not brightly lit. The camera's flash is used to add fill light. The backdrop is 1.95 m (6.5 ft) from the camera.

At the widest angle of the zoom, the P880 captures a field of view equivalent to a 24mm lens, a very wide field of view that is ideal for indoor shots and for landscapes.

For this image the flip-up flash is used, adding its light to the ambient lighting. Sensitivity is set to Auto, allowing the camera to increase it between 50 and 100 ISO to augment the lighting power of the flash.

The image is captured using the TIFF format to avoid any possibility that the sharpness will be decreased because of the compression.

ZOOM PHOTO

Now we zoom in on the centre of the image above to gauge the sharpness of the image at the zoom's maximum setting. The camera remains at the same distance as in the preceding photo.

At the maximum telephoto setting, the zoom is equivalent to a 140mm lens, a focal length that is usually regarded as a medium telephoto, but which is ideal for most standard photography.

The uncompressed TIFF format is used and the camera yields an image that is very detailed and sharp, as can be seen in the section of the full-size image shown below.

CLOSE-UP PHOTO

The image shown here is shot using the Super Close-up mode of the camera. The mode is only accessible through the Flower Scene mode, which as all Scene modes controls the selection of the aperture and shutter speed, the CCD sensitivity, and which limits the selection of image formats to JPEG.

The Super Close-up mode allows the zoom to be used partially, which increases the effective magnification, and produces a field of view of 5.5 cm (2.14 inches). However the camera usually selects a very large aperture, and if more light is added, the program simply increases the shutter speed to avoid camera shake. The result is that the depth of field in the image is very shallow.

BUILDING PHOTO

This image is our outdoor test. The architecture of the building, in particular the angled girders, immediately show the presence of jaggies. The shadowed entrance can also often reveal the quality of the exposure.

With its 24 mm wide angle, the P880 is able to encompass large sections of the building's wings. Although there is some barrel distortion in images captured at that focal length, it only becomes noticeable when the subject is closer, and when there are obvious vertical elements in the frame imaged near the frame's edges. But with this subject, the distortion is not visible.

The value of such a wide angle is obvious for a number of subjects, but its drawback is that the wide angle image is rarely as tack sharp as one captured when the zoom is used at a slightly longer focal length.

ZOOM PHOTO

Zooming in on the entrance of the building, the shadowed entrance takes on a greater importance for the metering and can cause an overexposure of sections that are directly lit.

In view of the fact that at this season the sun is low in the sky, even at 1 pm when these photos of the building were captured, a sensitivity of 100 ISO was used to allow for a slightly faster shutter speed and prevent camera shake.

Even at 100 ISO, the photos the camera produces are almost noise-free in shadow areas and, as can be seen with this example, record a great deal of detail.

NIGHT PHOTO

Since this camera is capable of long exposures, a photo taken at night is included here.

Set to the Manual Mode, the P880 offers preset (timed) shutter speeds up to a full 16 seconds, and a Bulb mode that is completely flexible and which has a maximum of 60 seconds. Regrettably, the camera has no wired or remote shutter release, even as an option, which limits the usefulness of the Bulb mode since the shutter release has to be maintained pressed while the exposure takes place.

However, with the subject shown here, a night shot of downtown Vancouver from a public pier, an exposure of 16 seconds at f4.1 is sufficient to produce a very clear image.

The P880 has a dark frame noise reduction system which captures a second frame of the same duration as the first one, but without opening the shutter. The noise recorded during the second exposure is then used to identify and eliminate noise from the first exposure prior to saving it. The resulting image is very detailed and prints perfectly — and noise-free — up to a 5 x 7 size. Worth noting, the whitish horizontal line that can be seen in the image shown below and clipped from the full-size frame, is the wake of a passing boat.