Kodak MC3

Good battery life, video quality. Poor picture quality in dark environment. Overall the Kodak MC3 is a good toy.

I bought the Kodak MC3 digital camera a few years ago as a replacement for the cheap $30 web cam I'd bought about a year before that. The 640x480 resolution camera is good for taking pictures for posting on the web or eBay, which is what I mainly bought it for. I could never get the included software to recognize the camera driver (using Win98), but with a card reader (not included) for the CompactFlash card this isn't really an issue. It does support at least up to a 1GB CompactFlash card.

Using the camera itself is easy, and switching between the different modes is easy and takes a few seconds. The MP3 player produces good sound, and with the expandable memory your only limited by the memory card. All around, worth the $40-$50 I spent for it on Ebay.

I bought this kodak MC3 portable MP3 player to take web pictures, period. The 640x480 is OK but an option to 800x600 would have been nice to have. The pictures are OK, but the camera responds too slowly to changes in lighting. It was on sale and cheap ($170CDN), but 16MB is insufficient for other than the pictures. Tempted by the capability to do movies I bought a 256MB CF card and that's where my frustrations began. I want to view movies through a TV at times to share with others. The special 3-insulator (probably proprietary) AV plug is some idiots attempt at getting Kodak a few extra $ (or euros?) at our expense or is it because the TV output just doesn't work - don't know. No one has this piece of cabling in stock here and I can't buy a plug to make my own adapter. It would have been so much better to have a simple "phono" socket for the video and use a small pigtail adapter to hook in the existing audio, or... anything but this! Who wants to carry that cable anyway! If unable to solve my TV cable problem, I may return the device just to spite Kodak for this fiasco. I liked it enough to buy the memory, but can always use this for other purposes. The short battery life is a problem as well as having 3 AAA's - not many chargers that take 3, but for now I have made do with buying a dozen alkalines (till I decide wheather to keep or not). Charging within the camera and an external power plug are needed. It would have also been so good to use it as an mp3 voice recorder. The concept is good but the frustration is knowing what it could have been! Wait for MC3.1 or MC4.

My Kodak MC3 MP3 player does not recognise subfolders and I cannot get it to recognise playlists. Doesn't work 100% with win XP (can freeze the computer when copying from a 2nd harddrive. When it does work it is very easy to use and supports drag and drop. Comes up as another harddrive. Video not good but passable for the price. Does not take video or pictures after dark. Bad tech support.

This MP3 is a good allrounder but as you can imagine they have reduced the quality of all items to include them. The video works well but with the 16mb card that is included you get about 1 min of filming. You can put about 5 mp3 songs on the player before it's full so hope you like those 5 songs. The camera photo's are fairly low res but you can put a good number of photos on it. You can listen to about 20 songs before the 3 AAA battries run out so it would be wise to invest in some rechargable battries.

I upgraded to a 64 meg card which set me back about $160 australian (it was a generic-Kodak ones are even more expensive) this allowed me to put about 16 MP3 or 3.5min of video or 350 photo's. The cradle that came with it worked with one of my computers but not the other one so I have to then buy a card reader ($100 australian) to put mp3 on the player. The card reader was well worth it because it works like a plug and play hard drive I can put any files on the 64mb card i bought and transfer them from computer to computer. We have another MP3 player that dosn't eat battries and has a 64mb space on board but is not upgradeable. If you are after a three in one then it is one of the better ones on the market with everything upgradeable and it's a great toy with an large screen good sound easy use with lots of features.