The EasyShare V550 offers
a brand new look for a Kodak camera, one that should be well-suited
to the current demands of the market. Yet, once the camera
is turned on, it is clear that even if it looks different,
the V550 is a Kodak camera as it offers all the usual user-friendly
characteristics of other EasyShare cameras.
While the capture modes are numerous, these are all automatic
modes, and only when using the Auto Shooting mode is
it possible to modify some of the parameters used to capture
an image.
Aperture: f3.6; shutter
speed: 1/800 sec, 80 ISO.
Moreover, only when using the Custom
mode, one of the modes accessed as part of the Scene (SCN)
modes, is it possible to save specific image-capture settings
and have them recalled after the camera has been turned off.
However, once the camera is turned off and turned back on, it
always restarts at the Auto Shooting mode which returns all
settings to their defaults. Therefore, to recover previous settings
the user needs to switch back to the Scene modes, and reselect
the Custom mode, a process that eliminates some of the practicality
of having a Custom mode.
Aperture: f2.8, shutter
speed: 1/100 sec, 80 ISO.
Exposures made with the V550
are usually excellent as the Multi-zone metering is effective
at calculating an average of bright and dark areas in the
frame without giving preference to one or the other.
The Auto white balance is reliable and regularly yields accurate
and natural colours under a variety of lighting sources. Likewise,
the V550 produces well-saturated colours, especially for blues
and greens.
On occasion though, a blue sky can
turn out quite to be quite intense and some users may be tempted
to stick to the Auto/Custom shooting modes so that they can
turn down the saturation. Worth noting however, the colour saturation
control affects all colours and not one specifically, and when
the saturation is decreased reds can sometimes look a touch
anaemic.
The V550 is equipped with
a zoom offering a very standard focal length range. It is
a quality lens that shows no barrel distortion at the wide
angle end unless the subject is very close, or the macro mode
is used. For instance, with architecture photos such as the
one at right which contain straight and converging lines,
distortion is invisible. While at the telephoto end, the zoom
appears to have no detectable pincushion distortion whatsoever.
Aperture: f4.5; shutter
speed: 1/800 sec, 80 ISO.
Furthermore, none of the photos
we captured with the V550, whatever the subject and conditions,
revealed any trace of a chromatic aberration at any point throughout
the entire focal length range of the zoom.
Aperture: f2.8; shutter
speed: 1/80 sec, 80 ISO.
While the default settings
of the V550 use Auto ISO which allows the camera to adjust
the sensitivity as required by the amount of ambient light,
the camera appears to be programmed to stick to the lower
ISO range as much as possible to minimize noise, and in fact
most photos are captured at 80 ISO.
When the sensitivity is set manually, images reveal little
noise at 80 and 100 ISO. Some shadow noise becomes detectable
at 200 ISO, but if the sensitivity is used to boost shutter
speed with daylight shots, noise should be effectively undetectable
under most circumstances.
At 400 ISO however, noise is visible
in the uniformly coloured areas of daylight shots, while at
800 ISO — a setting only available with a 1.8 MP image
size — noise is visible throughout the image, even with
photos captured under good lighting conditions.
Probably the single biggest
regret we have about the V550 is that there is absolutely
no user control over the compression applied to the images.
With the V550, Kodak, just as a few other manufacturers have,
follows the regrettable trend of tying image size to compression
permanently. At the 5-megapixel image size, the highest image
quality available with the V550, this compression can vary,
depending on the subject, from a ratio of 9:1 for most subjects,
to on occasion a compression as strong as 25:1. And with some
subjects, the compression can lead to a loss of sharpness,
noticeable when the image is looked at 100% scale on a monitor.
Aperture: f4.5; shutter
speed: 1/640 sec, 80 ISO.
Similarly, while it is likely that
many of the photos captured with the V550 are destined to be
printed, the possible print sizes per image resolution listed
in the camera's manual — 20 x 30 inch prints from a 5
megapixel images and 11 x 14 inches from 3.1 megapixel for example
— should be taken with a grain of salt. A 5-megapixel
image printed out to a 20 x 30 inch size would have to be printed
at around 85 dpi, which would produce a rather coarse image.
More realistically,
when it comes to printing, if the camera is set to the largest
image size (5-megapixel) it can be expected to produce excellent
prints at a 5.25 x 7 inch size — at 368 dpi —
or even prints up to 8 x 10.6 inches at a 241 dpi.
Generally the V550 turns out bright and vibrant images, and
is clearly designed to fit the needs of users that want a
simple to operate, no-fuss camera. Its Scene programs are
quite effective when used to capture their intended subjects,
and the Auto shooting mode, while simple to use, offers some
control to the user.
Image Quality
