Kodak EASYSHARE C122 8.1 Mp Digital Camera Silver

A kid’s first “real” camera, April 27, 2011

By 

Brian Connors (Yarmouth, MA) –

  

  

A certain degree of lowered expectations is required when dealing with a camera like this; it’s essentially a toy camera with “grownup” build quality. I bought this for my 9-year-old nephew, and he certainly wasn’t disappointed; it wasn’t up to my standards, but for a first camera, it’s great.

The C122 has a lot of the same design language as its “grownup” relatives like the C182 and M550, but the hardware is much more basic — the business end of the camera is a glorified cell phone camera, and the flash unit, instead of being one of the smaller HID flashes common on current models of cameras, appears to be similar if not identical to the flash units on a FunSaver. Picture quality is a little schizoid — daylight and flash pictures are generally pretty good, though nighttime shooting really doesn’t even reach acceptable without a floodlight and heavy editing, and it’s extremely susceptible to shaking (good thing it’s got a tripod mount). Video quality actually seems to be better than still quality, delivering a respectable 480p picture that probably makes this camera better for young filmmakers than junior Ansel Adamses. The learning curve isn’t steep and the interface is pretty much identical to Kodak’s other non-touchscreen models — my nephew had no problem at all setting up a timed shot without my assistance. The digital zoom seems to have a bit of antialiasing magic going on because it’s not quite as awful as the typical digital zoom; I still wouldn’t use it though. The small screen is small, but adequate; you might want something bigger but it’ll be fine for the kids.

The software side, unfortunately, is pretty dire. Kodak’s user base doesn’t seem given to much hacking, so there’s no way to get a raw image out of the camera that I know of. That’s not a horrible problem, because as I said above, the JPEG quality is reasonably acceptable. And there’s a special place in hell for the pretty but useless EasyShare client software — it’s several generations behind all of its competitors (even the phenomenally ugly Nikon ViewNX package), providing no more functionality than the early versions of Apple’s iPhoto. (Try Google Picasa or Canon’s software if you don’t want to spring for iPhoto ’11, Lightroom, or the like, and use Picasa or Flickr for your galleries.)

Like I said, lowered expectations. By the time someone gets to high school, they’ll have outgrown the C122, but up till that point, it’s probably 90% of what a junior photographer needs.

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