» Kodak EasyShare V705 7.1MP Digital Camera with 5x Ultra-Wide-Angle Dual-Lens Optical Zoom

Kodak EasyShare V705 7.1MP Digital Camera with 5x Ultra-Wide-Angle Dual-Lens Optical Zoom Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: I love and hate this camera
Comment: It's a wide angle camera that you can fit in your pocket--so it's great that way. The in-camera stitch is nice, and battery life is very impressive. But there's some real annoyances too. My beefs with this camera:

* No control over image compression: Kodak has one setting and in my opinion it's far too highly compressed. Forget about being able to take a standard shot and focus in on some interesting detail. They're all lost in compression artifacts. Come on, Kodak: how hard is it to have a RAW mode? And why have a 7MP camera when the file sizes are the same as the 5MP?

* Low light performance is, to put it bluntly, crap. You'll need a tripod, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a camera you can fit in your pocket.

* The flash is harsh.

* The processor is far too slow for any kind of sequence shots.

* Even though the camera has a text mode, it's not very useful. Keep this in mind: if you want to shoot a sign or a map with small print--which I often do on my job--you will find this a very, very tricky process to get right. You have to have good lighting to pull it off, and this is where a RAW mode would really help.

For the money, if you want to do wide-angle outdoor shots with a camera you can fit in your pocket, you could be really happy with this unit. I've certainly received a lot of compliments on the quality of some of the photos I've taken with this (see therealkezekiel on flickr), but they're all on outdoor shots in decent to good light.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Some good, some bad
Comment: This camera has a lot of really nice features, especially the panoramic "stitching." I wish they had paid more attention to picture quality in low light. I cannot find settings that don't make some photos look dark and speckled.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: satisfying item
Comment: As you know, kodak has stopped producing this wonderful stuff with dual-lens.
Satisfied so much, now I'm looking forward to meeting another awesome product.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Extras, Lousy Basics
Comment: This camera can do an awful lot. Like stitch several pictures together to make one long panorama picture. Great. It has a 5x optical zoom AND a wide angle. Great. It's got a huge and pretty decent LCD screen. Great.

However, it's basic photography skills are lousy:

1.) It's got NO VIEWFINDER. Taking pictures in bright daylight is made difficult, as you HAVE to use the screen to frame your shot.

2.) Pictures are noisy. No qualifiers here, even in perfect sunlight, there's a lot of digital noise in the shots, even in the midtones. More than I have seen in any other digital camera.

3.) The autofocus is terrible. Even after it came back from Kodak, who fixed it under warranty, pictures are still frequently out-of-focus blurry, and that is when we're talking still objects at moderate distances.

4.) There's way too much contrast in the photos, most of them have some areas overexposed (white, all detail lost) and other areas underexposed (black, all detail lost).

I'm off to find a compact camera that can do 1-4, and I'll do the rest on the computer...

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great real estae camera when used with external flash
Comment: This is a great camera for real esate. The problem with the V705 for real estate is the wimpy flash on the camera. The flash was designed to light up people 6 to 8 feet away from the camera, not large rooms. I bought an external flash off ebay that works with any digital camera and the photos are excellent. The flash unit is larger than the camera!

Also get a monopod to help hold the camera steady, the monopod will store under your car seat, the flash in the glove box and the camera in your pocket.

Check out www.realestatecamera.info for a link to an external flash. Also check out www.photographyforrealestate.net for the best information on real estate photography.

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