Rating: 
Summary: Very Nice Camera! Get the printer dock too.
Review: At first I liked this camera and was wowed by its ease of use and 1.8" LCD viewfinder. But after about two weeks of heavy use, I've come to regret my purchase, because the picture quality is just not as good as I first thought.While the pictures have good color balance, they are overly sharpened. In everyday language this means you'll see jagged lines in your pictures, and main subjects (such as people) look as if they stand out from the background in a faux 3D effect. Pictures taken with the DX6440 also tend to be very noisy, even on a sunny day, resulting in lots of video-capture-like artifacts. This is especially true when you look at people's faces on screen. This is quite disappointing. Please note that I'm not saying the pictures taken with this camera are bad. If you get an offbrand product like Argus or Samsung you'll get truly bad pictures. Compared to those the Kodak gives good results. The pictures are acceptable and make nice prints here, but when compared to cameras in teh same price and megapixel class from Canon, Casio, Fuji, Konica Minolta, Nikon, and Sony, the DX6400 cannot hold a candle in terms of picture quality, period. Ultimately this is a point-and-shoot digital camera. You turn the dial to Auto mode and just snap away. There is a semi-manual mode called PAS ("program, aperture priority, shutter priority") that offers limited manual controls. You cannot, for example, set both aperture and shutter, so pro photographers shouldn't buy this camera. Also, you'll have to turn the (flimsy) mode dial all the way around to get to the PAS mode, thus discouraging even a semi-serious photographer like myself who enjoys setting manual settings. The best feature on this camera is probably its 4x optical zoom, and zooming in and out is pretty fast. The lens is supposedly designed by a top German optical company, so it's too bad that the digital signal processing circuitry inside the camera does not retain images in top-notch quality. Some annoying cons/quirks are: - No case is included. This is the most disappointing aspect of the package. They give you a dock and two special batteries (one chargable included with the dock, the other non-chargeable included with the camera itself), but no case. Not even a cheap one. Kodak, why??? - No independent playback mode. By this I mean you have to turn on the entire camera in order to play back pictures. It's plain silly to let the lens mechanism go to work if the user just wants to review a picture or two. This is part of what I meant earlier by the smart engineer/dumb interface designer thing. Kodak: take a look at Canon's products. - As mentioned before, the mode dial is just a stupid interface idea. - You operate the camera with your right hand, but the interface controller (a joystick) is operated with your left hand. Kinda awkward. Make that very awkward. - You cannot set compression level. You can only set the resolution (4, 3.5, 2 and 1). It would have been nice to be able to set compression level. (Of course, I'd have set it to the lowest compression anyway.) - Internal memory (16MB) and flash memory card are not treated as one integrated unit. Get this: when you are using the memory card, you cannot even review pictures in internal memory, unless you manually set storage mode to internal memory. But then, you won't be able to review pictures on the memory card. Again, very dumb. Ok, summary time. The quirks I listed above mean I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this camera. This comes as an ultimate disappointment to me because I always wanted to buy (and keep) an American-brand digicam. (HP digital cameras suck, period.) The Kodak's picture quality is disappointing with video-capture-like artifacts. The camera is very easy to use, but in the end, you'll be better served by excellent offerings from Canon, Casio, Fujifilm, Nikon, and Sony. Take a look at Canon S410 (4MP) or the Casio QV-R51 (5MP); both have top-notch picture quality.
Rating:
Summary: WOW!
Review: Well, like a lot of people I did a bunch of research on digital cameras before I got one.
After looking at many cameras I had it narrowed down to the 4mp Samsung or the Kodak DX6440 (I had considered Cannon cameras but after all the problems I had heard about them I stayed as far away as I could). I bought my DX6440 from www.compuplus.com and what a deal after getting it home it was very easy to install and is very easy to use. Just turn it on auto mode and that's it, read eye is not bad at all, excellent picture quality excellent Video mode. The dock it another of the biggest features, knowing your camera is always ready and fully charged, plus a one touch picture transfer is awesome! Trust me if you get this camera you will not be disappointed, if you want to know more or have more questions please send me and email: haines203@yahoo.com
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