Kodak has stopped making professional cameras. They’ve switched. To making prosumer cameras. Prosumer as in professional slash consumer. The professional part of this camera lies in its capabilities with respect to photographing modes it supports and its RAW capability. The consumer part undoubtedly includes its fixed zoom lens.

The Kodak P880 is a nice, slim 8 MegaPixel camera. It is made of rugged plastic. It comes with a Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon zoom lens, capable of zooming from 24 mm to 140 mm (35mm camera equivalent). I found the lens to be of excellent quality throughout the zooming range. For people who want more zoom power there’s either a digital zoom which goes all the way up to 12x, or a number of add-on lenses --which I wasn’t able to test.

The camera has all the controls you could ever crave for. It has preset programmes, the full PASM range of control capabilities, macro capabilities, ISO control, and even a modest power drive (for burst photography). The P880 even has a built-in flash, but also comes with a regular flash shoe, so that you can use an external and more powerful flash if you like.

The back of the camera shows a large LCD colour screen. The menu system is clear and concise, offering you a large number of options that you can set, including the photo format. Formats supported are three modes of JPEG, and TIFF and Camera RAW in PASM modes. 

The camera can be used as a poor man’s videocam and has a button for directly connecting to Kodak Easyshare, Kodak’s photo software. The supported external memory card format is the SD Card standard.

Using the P880 is just like using a regular SLR camera, except it’s just a tad less bulky. One thing I don’t particularly like about the P880 is the noise it makes and keeps making whenever you handle it. As soon as you change its orientation with the lens open, it will make a sort of subdued cracking noise, which becomes quite irritating after a while. That is because by default it’s set for continuous autofocus. You can of course just switch AF
mode in one of the menus.

On the positive side is the Li-Ion battery which goes on and on, except when using the flash intensively. I took a large number of pictures in all kinds of light conditions. Kodak says the camera is particularly well suited for low-light conditions, and it is indeed capable of shooting photos in poor light conditions, but the resulting photos do contain some noise.

I also used the exposure compensation to see what the results are with Photoshop CS2’s HDR capabilities, and the results were great. Exposure metering is another area whhere the P880 is almost if not equally good as a professional camera. You get three different pre-defined zone settings and one setting where you can set the zone yourself by moving a cursor.

I was less impressed with the RAW output. Perhaps I should rephrase that: I wasn’t able to see for myself how RAW looks at all. Adobe hasn’t updated its plug-ins yet, and the only software capable of recognizing the P880’s RAW format is Easyshare. But Easyshare immediately converts RAW into another format, which makes it utterly useless as a format by itself for now.

Conclusion

The Kodak P880 costs a mere 650 Euros. If you buy all of its extras, you still end up with a camera which sells for less than 1,000 Euros. That’s less than the Canon D350 (which, if I’m not mistaken is called the “Digital Rebel” in the US) with a mediocre lens with plastic instead of glass components. Kodak’s Schneider-Kreuznach is claimed to have glass components.

I found the photos taken with the camera of good quality, sharp and with good colour saturation and balance. Only in very poor light conditions did the photos not look quite as good as marketing department would have you believe. I’d say this camera is worth its money.