Kodak P880 Zoom

[softcell72]

I bought this camera just under a year ago as a stepping stone to a DSLR. and while it has a few limitations it's been overall a pleasant experience. and at times a suprise.

It was pretty intuitive, I was up and shooting within roughly an hour of unpacking the box.

The basics.

The body, is sturdy and heavier than most digicams, on the neck strap for any length of time and you'll be feeling it. but the weight did balance well in my hands and felt comfortable.
the controls made sense to me and after I'd had it a few weeks I could change settings on the fly pretty much without thinking about it.

There are alot of controls and settings to play around with, I'm going to give a quick rundown of the better ones.

Shooting modes, I mostly use manual, portrait, super close up and landscape.

In portrait mode you need to set the WB yourself because the camera almost always comes out wrong, but if you set a custom or click WB they turn out fine. night portraits also come out well.

Super close up was the biggest suprise for me, even in uncertain conditions and low light most of these came out very good, the focusing was excellent.

Landscape/night landscape. landscape worked beautifully, natural colors, good exposures and WB, night landscape was EXTREMELY noisy though. night scenes are not this cameras strong point.

It does have alot of options to set a certain mood in your shots- color modes(high,normal, low, B&W, and sepia) sharpness and contrast also have settings for high, low and normal. as well as preset WB settings and one click or custom settings.

The downsides to this camera are speed, particularely when shooting in RAW format. and as I already stated it does not perform well at night.

You can buy lenses and filters(and it does have a setting you can change for lenses too) for this camera but I wasn't too impressed with the setup there, it has a ring you unscrew, to screw on the optional adaptor tube which you then screw the lens into (55mm size) unless you zoom out a ways there is vignetting caused by the tube adaptor and zooming tends to cause blurring even on a tripod.

On the subject of blurring, at slower speeds and low light ALWAYS use a tripod because the blurring is significant. however at fast shutter speeds and in bright light you can shoot almost anything without too many issues.(it also has a sport mode for action shots)

Overall I am pretty happy with it and have learned alot about exposure/aperture, and various settings just from trying things out and seeing what affect it had on the photo.

Overall I'd give it an 8 out of ten