Rating: Summary: Buy It! Review: I've owned a lot of cameras (and still do), but this one is by far my favorite. The quality of the photos is excellent and it's easy to use. I am on the leading edge of the Baby Boom and consequently need glasses for close-up, but this camera and the digital menus are easy enough to read without my glasses. I don't think you can go wrong if you purchase this camera.
Rating: Summary: Great Outdoor Shots So-So indoor. Review: I really love this camera. Its small compact and takes some really great shots...Outdoors indoors even with a flash it just doesnt get it right. I upgraded the firmware for the cam which improved the focusing slightly but not enough.
Rating: Summary: Very happy I waited... Review: I searched and searched and searched for what-I-hoped-to-be-the "perfect" camera. It had to be flexible, allowing for simple point-and-shoot AND manual photography. I wanted to be able to use zoom, telephoto, and wide-angle lens. I wanted a LOT of pixels. I wanted it to be able to grow with my expertise. Finally, it had to be affordable.It's not often you hit the ball out of the park in your first at-bat. The DC4800 is a great camera! I didn't buy it here (mine came with an extra battery and a 64MB CompactFlash card instead of 16MB), but I had to tell SOMEBODY! ;-) I was tossed between the Sony Mavica that writes to mini-CDs and this camera. The Mavica sells for $1300, and is only a 2.1 megapixel. The money I saved on the DC4800 went toward two extra batteries (4 total), a battery charger, an extra 64MB Compact Flash, an external USB card reader, and a trip to Boston for summer vacation!
Rating: Summary: Nightmare Review: My experience with the 4800 has been really horrible. The software did not work (E-Mails were not sent and pictures did not print as promised). I waited 45 minutes to speak to a customer service representative about this issue. They had no idea what was wrong, but agreed to send me the "updated" software. They refused to send it by express mail so I had to wait over a week to send the pictures that were the real reason for buying the camera. It was such a disappointment. After installing the new software, E-Mails sent through the Kodak software are now delivered , but I still cannot print in the format of the photopaper furnished with the camera. The software is unstable. Pictures selected for printing, for example, suddenly are eliminated. When I E-Mailed Kodak about these issues, customer service said "I suspect that you will find similar hold times if you purchase a competitors product, since we're pretty much all in the same boat." It seems that Kodak is shooting for pretty low goals in providing service. The battery life is extremely short so add the price of new batteries to the purchase price.
Rating: Summary: Lots of Bang for the Buck! Review: I am very pleased with my new DC4800! Kodak has put in a lot of quality options that will please both the novice and expert photographer! It is easy to use, lightweight, and fun to take pictures with. Compared to other brands in this class, Kodak seems to have better quality pictures than any other camera I have used or seen. My only disappointment is that the camera didn't come with a carrying case.
Rating: Summary: Wonderful Camera Review: I have shot 35mm for decades. A few years ago I got tired of lugging my SLR outfit around and started using good quality P&S autofocus cameras which did a generally good job but fell short in flexibility and indoor flash capabilities. I tried out a Kodak DC 215 last Fall to see if digital was for me. I really liked the advantages of digital, but realized I needed a 3-megapixel camera to get the quality I wanted. The DC 215 also offered no more flexibility than my P&S cameras. I narrowed my choices to the Kodak DC 4800, the Olympus C-3000 and the Nikon Coolpix 880. I finally bought the Kodak due to the current pricing. I feel this is the best bargain in a 3-megapixel camera right now. The DC 4800 actually provides all the needed traditional film camera flexibility I want in a much more manageable outfit than my old SLR. When you register the camera on the ..., they will send you a ... lens adapter free. I plan to get the telephoto lens and with the built in zoom lens I will have nearly all the focal lengths I had with my SLR's three lenses and 2X tele-extender - all in a form factor that fits in a fanny pack. I downloaded the firmware version 1.04 and have had no trouble with low light focusing. I have had excellent results with picture quality and my results continue to improve as I learn to use all of the camera's features. There has been some criticism of the flash. The DC 4800's flash capabilities are at least as good as my P&S cameras, which I realize is ... with faint praise, but this camera's features allow you to easily overcome this limitation. Here's what you do: Buy an inexpensive tilt head automatic flash ( I got the Vivitar 2000, under ... at the country's largest retailer), and then purchase a flash shoe bracket that attaches to the tripod mount on the camera. This costs ... for a straight bar or about ... for an L bracket. If your local camera store doesn't have these, they are available on-line. Plug the flash into the camera's flash terminal. The extremely handy f-stop selection dial can be set to 5.6 for straight flash or 2.8 for bounce flash (I have always had better results with bounce). One caveat: As the lens zooms in, the f-stop setting will close down somewhat - I find you can zoom 1x to 1.3 x before this happens. Usually indoors this is not a problem as you can move closer to your subject instead of increasing the zoom. Bottom line is I get the same flash quality and convenience as on my SLR for only a ... investment - try this on most consumer digital cameras!
Rating: Summary: I LOVE THIS CAMERA! Review: One picture speaks 1,000 words! Take look at some pictures I took using Kodak DC4800: http://community.webshots.com/user/dimitrisokolenko (album "Kodak DC4800 test")
Rating: Summary: Awesome Review: This is my first, and possibly last, digital camera. I won't need another. This thing is AWESOME! But do the camera justice and yourself a favor, get a photo quality printer.
Rating: Summary: A great value for the features Review: I am definitely not a professional photographer. I did some online research and the DC4800 came out way ahead comparing features to price. At 3.1 megapixels, a 16 meg CF card, 3x optical zoom, etc. this camera is great for your first or second digital camera purchase. If you are comparing features, put a great deal more weight on optical zoom capabilities over digital zoom. Digital zoom is more of a marketing feature than a real one. When a photo is digitally zoomed, all it is really doing is making the photo look bigger in the LCD (viewer) but this has a negative effect on the resolution. As a novice user, I found the automatic settings worked really well (from a novice point of view). However, I believe the manual settings will meet our needs as well. The menus on the LCD are very easy to read, even in sunlight. This is something I've had trouble with on other devices. We tested our new camera at a conference in Anaheim. This meant that we used it in a wide variety of lighting senarios, ranging from indoor/night/mood lighing of a restaurant to outdoors at Disneyland with bright sunshine. Having used a Canon S100 in similar scenarios, I can tell you that the DC4800 performed tremendously better than the S100. Indoor pictures rarely required the use of the flash, although pics using the flash tended to wash out a great deal. However, this was easily fixed by adjusting the white balance. Overall, we were very happy with our photos. I have to admit that our originally purchased camera had to be returned to because it had severe focusing problems, [....] Our replacement unit performed much better and we are happy with our choice. A couple of tips for this camera: - Our lens cap has trouble staying on. We may purchase another one.... along with an idiot cord to keep us from losing it[g]. - While we thought the battery life was very good, we will be purchasing a second battery and charger -- specially since the camera takes 4 hours to charge the battery (with no camera use while charging but the stand alone charger takes only a hour. - The 16 meg CF card that comes with this camera will not be enough. Consider purchasing the biggest card you can afford. Overall, I like this camera.
Rating: Summary: Nearly perfect Review: First of all, all the great reviews here and on other sites for this camera are well-deserved. I will not waste more time repeating what others have said, except to say that the flash works as well or better than any point and shoot 35mm I have used before. However, the flash does tend to wash out color, which you can compensate for by manually adjusting the white balance, which is excellent on this camera, or by not using a flash and taking a longer exposure. I recommend the latter, and was very surprised at how sensitive the camera was in fairly low light. Certainly far more sensitive than my P.O.S. film camera. Battery life is a big issue for all dig cams, and I would say that if you do nothing to save battery life, you get about 2-3 hours of continuous use from one charge. If you turn off the LCD and don¡¯t use the flash, you will extend this a great deal. I am not sure how much more life this gives you, as the battery never ran out when I did this, but it is at least four hours. Your expectations for the battery should be similar to a laptop or a camcorder, and this battery works as well or better than most. As for complaints about the lens cap not attaching to the camera body, you don¡¯t have to be MacGuyver to figure out that a piece of string about 8 inches long should solve this problem. Pros: easy use right out of the box (after 4 hours to charge the battery), excellent manual, super images, fast download to PC, image control (white balance, exposure, aperture, color saturation, uncompressed TIFF option for really high res). Able to accommodate additional lenses with the adapter that you get free for registering the camera. Price is a plus, esp. now with the $100 rebate. Shop around and you can find this camera for... after rebate. Cons: memory card is comically, if not criminally, insufficient. At max resolution, one picture will be 9MB. The included card is 16MB. To state the obvious, this would give you ONE pic at max res. Using minimal compression, files are ~2MB. What is the point of having 3MP power if you can¡¯t use it? You need a bigger memory card, the EZ upgrade comes with a 64MB card and an extra battery for less than the price of the card alone. NB, the battery charger is not included in this package. The included software is not very good, to be kind. It is functional if you have no alternative, but I would say that Photoeditor is far superior and Photodeluxe or photoshop are too superior to even compare. Also, the camera software is not compatible with windows NT. You can buy a card reader for pretty cheap to overcome this, which you might want to buy anyway to avoid always connecting/disconnecting the camera from the PC. Overall: Buy this camera with the extra battery, charger, and larger memory and you will probably have no complaints.
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