Kodak EasyShare DX6490

Excellent digital camera! I have 2 of these. I have a friend that had one for over 6 years taking thousands of photos. There are design flaws, the hands on engineering is not that good. Where you hold the right side should be more room for fingers. the menu wheel is not easily turned by your thumb as the newer Kodaks are. The joystick is the weak link of this camera. It will break if not handled very carefully. My friends went out after 5 years of use. Some get only a year or so. Kodak has since done away with this engineering flaw. I wish it had never been in production! Oh well, buy a newer Kodak! I would like to take the engineer to task that created this joystick and hand hold nightmare! Kodak has the best overall camera for the $$$. Excellent optics and photo technology! The DX6490 was a prototype for the newer Kodaks. All the design flaws have been corrected!

Kodak EasyShare DX6490 is a great camera, have Mine since 2002 and it's still going.

Very easy to use, impressive quality images that put to shame my 10mp lumix.

Would highly recomend Kodak EasyShare I have owned one for two years and dont feel as if I need another camera.

I have been using the dx6490 continuously for three over years. I use it for work taking pictures of items in our internet auctions. To date we have taken over 80,000 pictures and have never even had to replace the battery, it has been dropped on more than one occasion and still works fine. You will not get better value for money.

The joystick went bad after 3 months. You can't even set the time, let alone take a picture when the joystick is bad. My Kodak EasyShare DX6490 digital camera is now a $300.00 paper weight. Kodak refuses to fix it because I can not find my receipt. It has a manufacturer date on the camera, so they should have been able to tell it was only a few months old and still covered under the 1 year warranty.

Terrible customer service. I will never buy another Kodak product.

The Kodak DX6490 camera is a good-quality SLR-style digital compact with as many features as most users will ever need. The lens quality is good, and it has a strong armoury of features found on traditional film SLRs, such as programmed exposure, shutter-priority, aperture-priority and manual. There is also matrix metering, centre-weighted metering and spot metering, though changing the metering options is not fast or intuitive, and requires the user to scroll through various menus to get there.

The LCD screen on the back is big and clear, and the viewfinder is also of an LCD design, so you get what you see, like on an SLR (no parallax error). The viewfinder also has a dioptre adjustment. The downside of an LCD viewfinder for spectacle wearers like myself is that in very bright sunshine it can be just as difficult to see the viewfinder as the LCD screen, as I recently discovered, and I found myself taking a number of similar shots of the same scene hoping that one of them would come out as I imagined.

The quality of the photos is acceptable, and will be a revelation if this is your first digital camera after having lived all your life on a diet of £25 fixed-focus viewfinder cameras that you've bought from such as Dixons, Boots or Argos.

So, it's easy to throw compliments, what are the things you should be aware of if you're thinking of buying this camera? Well, one criticism which Kodak could address with a downloadable software upgrade - but won't do because there's no money to be made from it - is that the camera will only save your photos in a JPG (compressed) format. JPG is what's called a "lossy" format, in other words saving your photos as JPGs looses fine detail. There is no option to save the photo you've just taken in any kind of "lossless" format, such as Raw or TIFF. Neither is there any way of adjusting the degree of JPG compression applied. The result is that areas of similar shade loose their detail, such as sunlit grass which can look like someone's just painted the scene with green paint, instead of there being at least some suggestion that the area of green splodge is actually made up from individual blades of grass.

Also, the camera suffers from "fringing" in areas of high contrast (such as where rooftops meet a grey cloudy sky, or if you're photographing someone in a dark suit against a brightly-lit background). The result is that a strip of bright-white pixels outlines the darker areas where the dark and light areas meet. This apparently is a common complaint with digital compacts, and one that the manufacturers seem to expect the consumer to just accept. However if the lens of a similarly-priced film-camera were to create such an effect on film, it would get slated by the photography press. That smacks of double standards to me, but there you go.

There is no integral hot shoe to attach an external flash, nor indeed any other way to do so (such as with a PC socket) but the internal flash is pretty strong and can be used with the camera on higher ISO settings to light up sujects upto around 4m away quite effectively, as well as providing a naturally-balance fill-in flash as and when needed. Watch for red-eye, though: this camera's a killer for it. If you're photographing someone who even slightly suffers from red-eye, then they'll look like the Devil incarnate with this camera.

The software supplied is quite comprehensive, but if you already have your own favourite image-editors and printing-software you won't need most of what's there. If you don't then there is enough there for doing basic prints and touch-ups.

Overall, this is a very capable compact digital camera, let down in my eyes only by the same failings seen on many of its peers. Having used it you won't be E-Baying your Leica M7, Olympus OM4Ti, Canon EOS-1V or Nikon F5, but instead you'll find it compliments them admirably.

The Kodak DX6490 camera is really this good. I know I'd be so fussy in manual mode that I'd miss the 'moment'. Automatic is enough for all but the most, er, retentive of users. Preprogramme your tastes when you first set up, and that's it.

A dependable Machine, I should say, in your pocket, 10X optical-SCHNEIDER-GREAT TELE and wonderful macros. Precison focusing and advanced features you would get in expensive cameras only. An apurture of 8 giving really deep depth of field in manual mode. WONDERFUL OUTDOORS. 4MP is more than what a "prosumer" would need. Incredibe battery life more than 300 shots with preview on. You will be more than glad to own this lovely Camera. Thank You Kodak.

I must concede that this Kodak DX6490 is a great digital camera to buy.

As a "professional" amateur in digital photography, this is probably all the camera you'll ever need. First, it's huge 2.2" LCD has a rich colour and gives you a true look of what the actual shot would be. For it's price, I am all for the manual controls it comes with. I am sick and tired of people criticizing it's lack of manual focus and white balance. If you want a camera with one, then buy one and stop whining. The zoom is great and it is very user friendly. I only read the manual to understand some of the terminologies used in the photo industry but playing with the controls gives you a better feel for the camera. As for the auto-focus, Kodak engineers could not have done an excellent job as I can testify that even a ultra low light conditions, it still focuses and take great shots. For most of you who complain about focusing and other stuff you claim that camera can't achieve, please read the manual and you'd be surprise at what you can do. In my area of work, I don't need too much manual controls to confuse me in taking pictures and I would like to take pictures at a moments notice and the DX6490 has no problem doing so. As for the battery capacity, I took about 300 pics. in preview mode and played with it in-between B 4 the battery died. Amazing.......which is more than what you'll need but I got a spare one just in case. Overall, I've had no problems and for a camera in this class, it's ease-of-use, performance and durability far exceed it's expectations. This is one good camera to own.

I would recomend the Kodak DX6490 camera to anyone. Especially if you want to get up close to things. Great if you want it for a point and shoot or if you want to do some manual things. I work at Best Buy and sell cameras so I've tested out quite a few. Kodak in general is very easy to use and great for the money.