Two Kodak digital cameras make picture-taking easy

KODAK has been the poster child for the tortured traditional photography industry as it grapples with consumers' switch to digital cameras.

Kodak may be the company that made photography a national hobby, but it was slow to snap to the fact that shutterbugs were abandoning rolls of film for megapixels. Kodak floundered but is regaining its footing by doing for digital picture-taking what it did for film 100 years ago: making it simple.

Here's a look at two Kodak digital cameras, one aimed at the casual photographer, the other at more serious users.

• EASYSHARE LS753 — $400, Eastman Kodak Co. Although digital camera makers push the megapixels, the amount of information in an image, there's a lot more to taking a great photo. For example, all the megapixels in the world won't make up for a cheap lens or poor color rendering.
The EasyShare LS753 does a good job of balancing it all. It's extremely easy to use; produces realistic images both indoors and out; is small and rugged, yet lightweight; and packs 5 megapixels into a decently priced camera. It's available online for about $335. acedemic writing service, online essays papers.

It comes with a Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon lens capable of 2.8X optical zoom. A digital zoom takes it all the way to 10X. It uses Secure Digital memory cards but comes with 32 megabytes of internal memory — not much if you are shooting full-size images, but plenty if you back off to the minimum 1.6 megapixels for e-mailing photos or posting them online.

My favorite way to judge a digital camera's ease-of-use is to see how far I can get into its menu system before reaching for the manual. I never had to crack the book for this one.

The LCD menu is complemented with a hardware-based menu that lets you quickly switch to sport mode (for taking images with motion), video, close-ups and portraits. The camera also lets you tag pictures for e-mailing, sharing online or as a favorite. You can then show only your favorites as part of an in-camera slide show.

The pictures taken by the LS753 are sharp and crisp, with very realistic colors. Flash pictures were acceptable, but not as well-illuminated as I'd have liked.

• EASYSHARE DX7630 — $500, Eastman Kodak Co. Most folks won't need the 6.1 megapixels found in the DX7630, but considering that its online price is about $350, just a little more than LS753, this baby's a bargain if you shop smartly.
Like the LS753, this higher-end model uses a Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon lens, with an optical zoom of 3X, boosted digitally to 12X. It's bigger than the LS753, with a shape more like a traditional camera, complete with a grip on the right side. It also has a slot for an SD memory card and a built-in 32 MB of RAM.

The DX7630 has an LCD menu system similar to the LS753, though it's navigated with a wheel-and-button combination rather than the rocking-button hardware on the smaller camera.

This one was a little harder to figure out; I hit the manual at least twice.

The DX7630 offers more for the serious photographer, including less lag time between photos and a robust burst mode, which can take four pictures at 2 frames per second, and a secondary burst mode that can snap 30 pictures at 2 frames per second, saving the last four.

Picture quality for images without the flash was as good as the LS753, though I thought flash pictures were actually better on the smaller camera. The DX7630's flash range seemed more limited.

Both cameras come with Kodak's EasyShare software for Windows and Macintosh, which includes tools for organizing, editing and sharing images. The software, like the cameras themselves, is very easy to use. And the cameras will work with the auto-import feature found in both Windows XP and the Mac OS X.