Kodak EasyShare DX7630

Posted by T3 Online on Tue 24 Aug 2004

Ugly, but it gets the job done

Here's a trick for mastering Kodak's digital cameras and making you the world's biggest pub bore. The second digit of the model name is the sensor size (here, six megapixels), the third digit is the zoom ratio (3x) and the first digit is the generation. So what have seven generations of Kodak ingenuity produced? This is one of the smaller, sexier cameras in the DX family, which is to say that it bears a passing resemblance to a large, grey, plastic turd - at least from the front. Flip the DX7630 round and you're confronted by a huge 2.2-inch colour screen. While it's not the gloriously vibrant OLED display that we first saw in generation six, it is a power-effi cient hybrid LCD that positively glows in bright sunlight.

As befits the company's most expensive camera, the DX7630 is bristling with manual features alongside the usual auto- everything modes. A very well-designed jog dial gives instant access to aperture and shutter settings, as well as sensitivity, exposure and fl ash-exposure compensation. You can spin the dial to tune into 22 different scene modes or delve into the simple menus to adjust the metering, focus, white balance and more. A fast multi-area focus system shows exactly where the camera is focusing, but it's easily confused in low light.

Full-quality six-megapixel images are extremely sharp and pulse with Kodak's trademark saturated colours. However, there is some purple fringing at wide-angle settings. MPEG-4 movies are small (320 x 240 pixels) but smooth and colourful. Although the DX730's dull design won't melt hearts, its comprehensive feature list and impressive performance should persuade minds that the latest generation of Kodak cameras is the best yet.