Good Things Come in Small Packages

I recently purchased this camera because I was going on a trip to Alaska and realized that I was going to end up taking a lot of pictures. I was never good with standard film cameras; always getting the film developed to see 15 different shots of the lens or my finger. Digital was certainly the way to go and prices have gone down on quality cameras.

I was looking for a camera was small with decent picture quality. One reason I rarely used my film camera, aside from the fact I had enough pictures of my finger, is that my camera (a Pentax of some sort) was bulky and a pain to carry around. Luckily enough, my friend at work was thumbing through Cargo magazine, a gadget magazine related to Wired, and there was a review of digital cameras in 3 different price ranges. There was budget, mid-range and SLRs. The Kodak LS743 ranked #1 in the midrange department. Based on that review, I searched Ebay and managed to purchase one with the camera dock included for a little under $300.

The LS743 was incredibly small; it fit in my jeans pocket comfortably the whole trip to Alaska. Yet it produces high quality pictures with a 4.0 megapixel resolution. The buttons are small but the interface is generally easy to use. The screen itself is a good size, especially considering the camera size. I purchased 256 MB SD card, which supplied about 200 pictures. Shutter lag is not great but servicable, about 3 seconds. The main problem I had was with the "OK" button. The "OK" button is also used as the directional button (to move up and down the menus) so at times I would try to press "ok" but end up moving the selection up, down, left or right instead.

The camera comes with a 2.8X optical zoom, which is not too impressive but with the digital zoom it improved to 10x. This was not a huge concern because I used the camera primarily for scenery. Don't be deceived though, the pictures appear blurry on the camera screen when using the digital zoom but come through clear when upload to a computer. There are also several different mode (sport, landscape, portrait, night, etc.) that allow you to maximize the picture quality.

With the camera came the Kodak EasyShare software which I used with mixed results. Staying true to the camera, the software is easy to use, especially when you have the camera dock. The dock plugs in to a USB port, is detected by the computer and just press the red "share" button and its all transfered for you. Printing from the software was not as impressive though. My fiance has a Canon digital camera with Canon software. The same pictures printed from the same printer using the Canon software came out much better than the Kodak software.

Overall, I am very satisfied with my purchase. Since I bought it off of Ebay, I save about $100 since the dock is an addition $70 or so. The camera fit my needs perfectly. It is a small camera that takes high quality pictures. The zoom is not incredibly useful but fulfills my requirements. I might suggest different software if you are concerned about printing high quality pictures. Unless you have a Canon you're not going to be able to use that, but I have been told that ACDSee is a good program. If you are relatively computer illiterate, the Kodak software will do fine.