Kodak DC290

The DC290 is the newest camera in Kodak's digital range. Manufacturers in every area of computing need a simple figure to latch onto to convey the superiority of their products, and with digital cameras, it is CCD resolution.

The 290's box proudly states that the camera has '3.3 Megapixel Ultra Resolution', but that's only when images are interpolated upward, artificially inflating resolution with no real gain in quality. The actual CCD resolution is 2.3 megapixels, pretty much par for the course at the high end. The highest non-interpolated image resolution you'll get from the 290 is 1792 x 1,200.

Kodak hasn't demonstrated a great deal of design flair in its digital range, although the 290 is better looking than some of the early models. It's pretty much square when viewed from the front, and the added height makes it comfortable to hold.

The unit's lens is an f3-f4.7, 38-115mm equivalent zoom, which again is more or less the standard for higher-end zoom models. But Nikon's Coolpix 700 and 950 will manage f2.6-f4, while Sony's F505K delivers f3.3 at its powerful 190mm telephoto setting.

The 290's image resolution and compression quality settings are separate, so you can choose either 720 x 480, 1440 x 960 or 1792 x 1,200 at any of three JPEG compression quality modes, or with lossless TIFF compression. This also applies to the Ultra 2240 x 1500 interpolated resolution, with the exception of the TIFF option.

The DC290 sports both optical viewfinder and 2in TFT monitor, with control via the monitor improved over earlier models: there's now a four-way thumb pad a la Sony for menu navigation. The thumbnail review mode is better than most, with four thumbnails displayed at a time along the top of the screen and an enlarged thumbnail of the current picture in the bottom half.

An excellent feature of the DC290 is its time-lapse mode. You can set the camera to take up to 1000 pictures at intervals of between one minute and 24 hours, assuming you have the memory. Once they're taken, you can assemble them into a movie with the AVI generator utility bundled with the unit.

There's also a voice recording feature via an integral mic - you can attach annotation to each shot individually, and when the shot is deleted, the annotation is deleted too.

The age of 4Mb digital cameras has thankfully passed, and the Kodak is supplied with a single 20Mb Compact Flash card. This will give you 250-300 pictures at the lowest res, highest compression mode, down to around 30 in high (non-interpolated) resolution with low compression.

This is a high-end consumer camera, not a semi-professional, and operation is largely automatic - there's no aperture or shutter priority mode. Exposure can be nudged by plus or minus two stops, and you can choose from multiple and single-spot auto, or manual focus. There are daylight, fluorescent and tungsten white balance modes, too, as alternatives to the automatic setting.

Digital camera quality is improving rapidly. The DC290 is no exception, and an image taken with low compression is hard to tell from a print.

The original bugbear of digital cameras was colour divergence - giving a video-esque quality - but this has now been mostly eliminated. CCD artefacts haven't completely disappeared, though, with discernable noise on uniformly-coloured surfaces, particularly white, in low-light shots without flash. Focus and image sharpness isn't as good as the competition, notably Sony's F505K. Edges tend to be soft.

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