Welcome to a Digital Camera Battery specialist of the Kodak Digital Camera Battery
Another day, another advanced digital camera. This is what it felt like when we got the Kodak Z650 into the office. Sure, it is big, has full advanced functionality and boasts a 10X optical zoom lens, but compared to the current crop of advanced models, this just isn't enough to get us excited anymore (bring on the nerd jokes!). We were hoping that once we got down and dirty with the camera we'd find a few things that would make us sit up and take notice, but try as we might, we couldn't help but feel unsatisfied.
There is a reasonable selection of options at your disposal, ranging from shutter speed, white balance, aperture and ISO level. They aren't particularly fleshed out however. The burst mode is quite paltry, taking just four shots at roughly two a second, and ISO level only goes from 80 to 400. Shutter speeds extend from 8 seconds down to 1/1000th, but there are the now obligatory Kodak pre-set shooting modes, (17 of them to be precise) that is great for the amateur trying to progress further. We did feel the absence of full manual whitebalance however, which is a must-have for advanced cameras these days.
Of course all the features in the world aren't going to cut it if the image quality is poor, and whilst the Z650 performed admirably in many of our tests, it really came up lacking with regards to colour representation. Our Imatest score of 1358 showed the camera produces very sharp images that will be suitable for printing all the way up to A4 and perhaps a little beyond, however the shots were noticeably oversharpened in areas which detracts from the realism a little. Noise performance was particularly impressive, with the camera boasting an excellent score in this category. Generally when we test with the automatic function, we find cameras overcompensating for darkness, giving us fuzzy, low quality pictures. This model however produced clean, smooth pictures with only a bare hint of noise.
Unfortunately, the rather poor score of 10.6 on our colour tests told us that the Z650 had problems in this area, and our test shots confirmed it. Dark colours seemed the least affected, with blacks and browns being reasonably accurate. As you move through the colour spectrum however to blues and reds everything starts to go pear shaped. The inaccuracy varied from too pale (reds) to overly dark (blues), which seemed to indicate that it is not an attempt by Kodak to make the images more pleasing (as many manufacturers do) but rather a flaw in the processing. In any case, we weren't satisfied by the colour representation of this model.
The lack of a Lithium Ion battery compounds the problems of this unit. Needing two AA batteries such as Kodak KLIC-5001 Battery, Kodak EasyShare Z760 Battery, Kodak EasyShare P880 Battery, Kodak DCS Pro 14n Battery, Kodak KLIC-7000 Battery, Kodak EasyShare LS755 Battery, Kodak KLIC-7001 Battery, Kodak EasyShare V610 Battery, Kodak EasyShare V570 Battery, Kodak Easyshare M1063 Battery, Kodak KLIC-7002 Battery, Kodak EasyShare V603 Battery for power, the Z650 suffers noticeably as a result. We managed about 150 shots before the camera died, and with batteries not getting any cheaper, you're looking at a hefty cost over the long run if you want to make use of this model.
We found the Z650 to be adequately quick, if not staggering. Shutter speed hovered around the 0.1 of a second mark, with startup taking just under 2 seconds. Shot to shot time was about 1.5 seconds, but slowed down noticeably as the memory filled up.