Digital cameras have over recent years become "respectable". Respected manufacturers who previously seemed confined to the purer film version of the photographic art are now happy to produce digital offerings - and offerings with all the gadgets and trimmings those devotees of the darkroom seem to regard as essential.

And discussions of these devices now fully embrace all those arcane technicalities which delight the enthusiast and utterly frustrate simple beings like this reviewer. For I personally know nothing and care nothing for film speeds, depth of field and exposure control - whatever all those things are - I simply want a box which takes a picture when I push the appropriate button and which subsequently produces an image which in some measure resembles what I saw in the first place.

Kodak is, of course, a name synonymous with my kind of photographer. Remember the good old "Box Brownie" or those dreadful chemist shop Instamatics? But they worked and if you were lucky, they actually produced respectable images which satisfied many Australian families of yesteryear.

So, What Of This Particular Offering?

This camera, when I purchased it two years ago, was fairly much a mid-priced product and is still fairly well placed in the quality stakes being of 3 Mp quality. It can be operated in manual mode with quite considerable control over shutter speed, exposure and various other parameters.

But for dummies like me, it comes set up in automatic mode with the user only needing to point and shoot. And in that mode I have used this camera, almost always without flash, in all sorts of lighting conditions; often in dimly lit churches or cathedrals or in other low light situations. Almost invariably the Kodak performs amazingly well and I have rarely experienced failures. All the thing seems to need is reasonably even light - no doubt using it in manual mode would provide even better flexibility - and the results are excellent.

My experiences with a totally bottom end (and bottom priced) camera taught me that seemingly poor digital images can often be turned into something marginally presentable (at least for Web display) by the various forms of colour and other manipulation available within programs like Photo Impact or IrfanView. But such procedures are quite unnecessary with the Kodak DC4800. The large number of images from this camera on my Tripod Web site http://rogerbrown.tripod.com are pretty much untouched apart from a little sharpening to compensate for the very considerable size reduction and JPG compression used to reduce the images to a size suitable for fast Web loading.

Like all such devices there are various picture quality options that affect the number of images able to be stored. The DC4800 uses standard Kodak picture cards and at the highest compression 3.1Mp setting (which provides all the quality I could ever want) a card will store around 32 images. File size per image is around 480 KB. For Web display normally I reduce this to between 50 and 80 KB and on odd occasions when I have had images of that size properly printed the results have been excellent.

The DC4800 is one of those cameras which, when connected to a USB port, becomes an extra local drive. In theory you could use it as an emergency backup device. Installation is virtually automatic under Windows 2000. It certainly makes life easier to have the camera's output immediately available to any Window application for editing or copying purposes.

The camera's options can be set by the device itself but they can also be accessed from your computer through a companion software application. This is often simpler.

I doubt if I have really scratched the surface in employing the various options and facilities of this camera. But to me the important thing is that it can provide me with excellent results without the fuss of having to do so. And that's what any such device should be able to do for people like me who simply want to take pictures without fussing with technicalities.
 
Thank you Mr Kodak.

Reprinted from the March 2003 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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