Review of Kodak EasyShare C182 Digital Camera

If you're looking for a great point and shoot digital camera with some nice manual capabilities at an affordable price, the Kodak EasyShare C182 may be the digital camera for you.

Priced around $100.00, the C182 combines ease of use with flexible features. I bought this Kodak camera after my old Canon decided to die after several years with no provocation. With 12.4 megapixels and a 3X optical zoom, the resolution on the EasyShare is great and the 8-1/1400 sec. shutter speed makes for nice, sharp, clean shots. The digital camera comes with 16 MB of internal memory and a slot for a SD card, but I've never had a need for one. The LCD display is nice and clear, and the camera is capable of shooting video. Upload to the computer is simple and smooth.

You can control the exposure to ±2.0 EV with 1/3 EV steps. There are white balance options at set modes (daylight, indoor, etc.), various shooting and scene modes with internal settings, and a handy "program" mode where you can control many of the features yourself. The automatic ISO sensitivity is 64-400, but you can set it manually up to 1600.

I've had this camera a year now with few problems in functionality. The one defect I can think of is that the long exposure modes do not work for me. The resulting shot is always blank and white.

If the EasyShare C182 has a single major drawback in its programming, it is the inability to manually set focus. There are three focus modes: macro, infinity and auto. The first two don't work very well. "Auto" works quite well overall, but the problem with it is that it focuses on the center of the screen whether you want it to or not--which means you cannot always frame a shot the way you want to. The macros you can get with this digital camera are nice enough, but this isn't a great camera for super close up shots of very tiny objects; it does best several inches or more away from an object.
 

The EasyShare C182 does do magnificently with landscape shots though. Not only are the shots well focused, and the lighting well distributed, but there is a wonderful, ineffable quality to them much resembling a watercolour if you view them zoomed to 100% on your computer. Zoomed back out, they look like ordinary photographs, but something of the painterly quality still lingers. This is something special which you won't find with every camera.

In conclusion, despite drawbacks with the auto-focus and the long exposure, the wonderful landscape shots and the decent macro shots make the Kodak EasyShare C182 well worth $100.00. More expensive cameras will give you a wider range of options and control, but this one makes up for it in adaptability, ease of use, and of course the stellar price. Several years ago, this same camera probably would've gone for about $500.00. A good thing to keep in mind!