Kodak Easyshare Z980

If only camera manufacturers focused as much on quality, as they did with cramping up spec sheets with as many useless features as possible, life would be so much better for everyone. Kodak’s gone down a similar path with the feature-rich Easyshare Z980.

Build Quality

The camera’s dimensions are 91 x 124 x 105 mm and it weights 445 grams, making it of average weight and size. The weight isn’t evenly distributed though, and the side where the batteries go feels heavier, making it a little uncomfortable to hold while taking shots.

Button placement’s gone the old Kodak way, which works for those who’ve been using Kodak’s superzooms for a while. I’m not too fond of how they’ve cramped up the self-timer, macro mode, flash and shutter buttons on top, along side the orientation and power toggle, and mode dial, on the top side of the camera. It feels really cramped up and counter-intuitive, considering most cameras use the selection d-pad to double up as a few of the shortcut keys, unlike the Z980. Also, the buttons feel really flimsy, like they’re made of cheap plastic, especially the shutter buttons (yes, there are two of them) which feel like shoddy pieces of silver plastic wedged into the body of the camera. The area around the shutter buttons are flat, making them cheaper.

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The over-all build of the camera - other than the buttons, that is - is pretty decent. The body’s made of hard black plastic which feels easy on the fingers. The grip of the camera though, is made of smooth rubber as opposed to textured rubber, which is a far better option. The smooth rubber doesn’t lend your hand too much grip, making the camera a lot more slippery than others out there.

The camera allows you to fix an external flash on it, and features a vertical grip attachment for those who wish to take vertically oriented shots. It even has a shutter button on the side of the camera. All you have to do is screw the cheap looking plastic on the bottom of the camera, and you have yourself a terribly uncomfortable vertical hand-grip that you’ll probably never want to use again. Another useless feature cramped in just to make the spec sheets look good.

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Features and Performance

The Z980 has a CCD sensor that takes shots of up to 12 megapixels, and zooms up to 24x. The lens is also capable of a respectable 26mm wide shots. Another great thing is that it allows you to save pictures in RAW format, other than JPG! But, it seems like a feature to compensate for the dissatisfactory picture quality. The camera’s sensor doesn’t pick up details too well, and sharpness goes for a toss sometimes even in shots that are in focus.

Auto-white balance was spot on though, and I love the vivid color reproduction of the camera. There a few tweaks made to the interface too, making it easier to navigate than before.

If you’re one for manual functionality, you’ll be glad to know that Z980 has plenty of that too. You have fully functional Manual, Shutter priority, Aperture Priority and Programmed Auto modes, which give you complete control over your shots. There are plenty of scene modes too, in fact one for almost every kind of shot you’d want to take. The only thing I don’t like about the auto-functionality, is that the camera tends to overshoot the ISO settings when set to auto-ISO, making images grainy even when not required.

Speaking of which, the camera’s ISO performance was decent, and images stayed relatively noise-free at ISO 200. Night shots too were pretty decent, but the camera tends to keep the shutter open for too long in the Night Scene mode, making some areas burn out a little at times.

Macro performance was about average too, and the camera focused on objects as close as 1.5-inches.

Moving to the other extreme of the spectrum, the camera’s 24x zoom is decent, but you need a tripod to use it since its image stabilization isn’t that great.