Kodak Easyshare CX7430 Digital Camera Review

Kodak Easyshare CX7430 Digital Camera Review

Design and Construction
Like all point-and-shoot digital cameras, the Kodak EasyShare CX7430 is designed to be compact enough to fit in your pocket. It's silvery finish will certainly attract lots of attention too. Its dimensions are 4.0 inches by 2.6 inches by 1.25 inches (weight-height-depth), and it weighs only 6.3 ounces. There is a little 1.6 inch LCD screen behind the camera for viewing images. Initially, I found the LCD screen a tad on the small side, but I got used to it after snapping a couple of photos.

Optics and Resolution
The Kodak EasyShare CX7430 is equipped with a Kodak Retinar lens and offers with a 4 megapixel resolution. There's also a 3x optical zoom for taking subjects faraway. What is interesting about this camera is its wide range of scene modes. Most point-and-shoot cameras have a handful (maybe 5) scene modes for photography under different conditions: macro, landscape, night photography, etc. The Kodak EasyShare CX7430 has 9 scene modes to choose from, which is much more than the competition.

I didn't expect much in terms of manual control in the camera's optics. If you're looking to play around with shutter speed, aperture, white balance and other photography options, then this camera is not for you. Sure, there are some basic exposure controls but they are nowhere near the fine settings allowed in advanced digital SLR cameras.

That being said, the quality of photos taken by the Kodak EasyShare CX7430 were nothing short of outstanding. The photos, when printed out, were of extremely high quality. So if you're the type you just whips out a camera and takes quick shots, with a minimum of fuss, then this camera will be great for you.

User Controls
The user controls in the Kodak CX7430 are located on both sides of the LCD and also on mode dial at the top surface of the camera. Those more accustomed to Canon or Sony models will find that the controls take a little getting used to. However, I did not have any problems reaching commonly used functions like flash control or image viewing.

Movie Mode
If you like to shoot some spontaneous movies with your digital camera, then you'll be glad to know that the CX7430 comes with a movie mode. You can capture video at 13 frames per second (fps) at VGA size 640 x 480. The movie mode is continuous, meaning that the camera allows you to record movies up to the memory limit of your memory card.

Storage and Transfer
In terms of storage, the Kodak CX7430 comes with internal memory of 16MB. You'll certainly want to purchase a SD or MMC memory card to add on to the amount of memory available. In terms of image transfer, the camera ......

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