Brilliant

This is a great little camera i bought it for a school trip and it didn't let me down you get a awful lot for the price and like the other review said the battery life is really good......i totally recomend this to anyone

Good camera - awful software

This camera is great for the price and does all that you need for snap shots of days out and the like. What lets it down is the amazingly tedious software that you have to use with it. It is annoying and should be unnecessary however you must use it to transfer the pictures off the camera. It would be much better if you could just access it as regular USB removable storage.

If you think you can tolerate the appalling software then I'd recommend this camera. Sadly it sucks too much to give it the full five stars.

Good replacement for film camera

I bought this camera as a replacement for a Kodak APS camera and can really see the advantages of digital photography over film. The only negative thing with the camera is that it lacks 'face detection' which is sometimes noticeable on distant shots.

It comes with software for making minor adjustments to your photos, such as the brightness or cropping the picture, but a lot more basic than other software available, which may be an advantage if you're not too technically minded. It also comes with other software for things like making greeting cards from your photos, which I'd recommend that you don't install unless you plan to use it.

Great results and easy to use

Ok so I'm not a tecky, I just want something that will give great pics and be easy to use straight out of the box and this camera does just that.
The instructions are almost intuitive and the on-screen display reminds you what part of the menu you are looking at.
The software is even easier to use - someone went to a lot of trouble to make it this simple.
Outdoor pics are comprehensively catered for.Only one slight reservation is flash photography but any camera of this size is unlikey to have the power to illuminate middle distance objects.
In terms of value for money I shopped around on Amazon a found a stunning deal.
100% recommended, even my missus likes it 'because it just takes brilliant photos'.

I loved it

This was a brilliant camera and I loved it. All my friends thought it was really good and so did I. Hence why I was not impressed when it stopped working about a week after I purchased it. While I could look at photos stored on it and could upload them onto a laptop, when I turned it on in photo-taking mode, the welcome screen appeared, the lens opened, the lens retracted and the camera turned off.

I brought it back to the store where I had purchased it and as it was within warranty they gave me a replacement. Obviously I was happy with this.

The bad news is that a little over a week later it developed exactly the same fault as the previous one. I brought it back to the store again and again exchanged it. This time for a different brand of camera.

If anyone has bought this model, I hope you have better experiences with it than I had. When it works, it is a very good little camera. Unfortunately in my experience, this doesn't last for that long.

Kodak c603

This camera to sum it all up is the ONLY camera to buy when you are starting off. After experimenting with a number of cameras, i found this one the best by far!! - so easy to use

Excellant

I have had this for a while now and have got some great shots, the sports setting is great for catching fast moving objects, in my case motorbikes. The setting for detail close up is excellant for getting detail shots of roses and in one case a ladybird. Video quality is very good and the optical zoom works well, especially for wildlife shots, I've blown these up onto canvas for the living room and found no pixelation. The only downside is the flash which can over expose sometimes leading faces to be drawn of colour, but that rarely happens if you watch lighting conditions.
Overall, very good camera.

Overall a good camera, missing some features

This camera is very good value for money in terms of the quality of images, excellent colour, and the quality optics that provide the 12x optical zoom (no doubt the most expensive part on the camera). I've got through trying out a number of cameras, and this is the one that seems to balance picture quality with reliability (so far) and price. The one thing that I am most disappointed with, is the lack of movie features. For instance the cheaper Samsung S630 provides a far better range of control parameters, such as 15 or 30 fps frame rate, instead here its a fixed 30fps. If you're using it as a camcorder, in slow moving scenes, you do not need a high frame rate, so you could use half the memory. Another annoying thing is the movie file format - quicktime mov. If only it could have been output as avi (in mpeg4), using something like the divX or xvid codec, as most budget movie editing software support .avi but not .mov files. I had to get mov to avi converter software to use it with my preferred editing software. That said, at least the overall movie quality is still excellent - my intention was to have a digital camera and camcorder in-one, and despite these annoying things, it this is still more than sufficient for that dual role. Another annoyance is the lack of bundled bits like a power supply (which I mistakenly thought would be included), and for which they charge a ridiculous amount on the kodak site. All it is 3 V, 2.5 A, which you can get elsewhere much cheaper, and some cheap cameras even include power supplies in the package. Well worth having one if you're indoors, as it gets through batteries (even if you have rechargeable, its inconvenient). Last gripe, suprising for a mid-budget camera, the lens cap falls off the lens too easily!

Like the Z612, one nice thing is that you can zoom whilst taking movies (the only other camera I've tried that allows this is the Samsung S630). Some reviews on other sites talk about the camera mic picking up the sound of the lens motor, this is true, but in most situations, if there is sufficient noise (e.g. somebody speaking near-by), you wouldn't hear it. Plus in some situations, e.g. if you were using this to record a mate's band at a gig, you'd use something like a separate minidisc recorder and dual (stereo) mics for better quality sound.