Kodak continues its offensive into the bridge market with the particularly interesting EasyShare Z812 IS.  This one sets itself apart with a stabilized 12x zoom (36-432 mm), 8 million pixel sensor and especially a video mode in HD Ready 720p format.

Handling

This little Kodak bridge looks quite nice.  Rather compact and with nice finishing touches, the EasyShare Z812 IS is a joy to use.  In fully automatic mode, the camera is responsive with a very fast autofocus in wide angle and it’s more than honest when zooming.  An LED assistance lamp also allows focusing in darker situations.  You can disengage the EasyShare’s automatic functioning and shoot in semi-automatic P,S, A and M modes.  Speed, aperture, and sensitivity settings can be adjusted via a dial (unfortunately too small) which you press to validate choices.  This type of control is much more elegant than modification by buttons. The 2.5 inch screen now displays 230,000 pixels, but still slightly lacks finesse.  Display however is fluid with very large viewing angles.  The 12x optical zoom is this camera’s strong point but there is still no wide angle (36 mm is sufficient to photograph indoors, for example).

Image quality

The Variogon lens by Schneider Kreuznach produces quality images but the gain from the 8 million pixel sensor compared to the Z712 IS is hardly noticeable.  The new image processor offers good results with more natural colors than previous models although they are a bit warm.  This is characteristic of Kodak.  Moreover, noise control has not really been improved.  Images are impeccable up until 200 ISO, a sensitivity where we start to see some grain and smoothing.  Photos are acceptable up until 800 ISO while in 3200 ISO files are only 2 megapixels and this setting is more as a last resort.  The macro mode is still rather disappointing and only focuses at 12 cm in wide angle.  Finally, shooting HD video with this camera is both a good and bad surprise.  It’s actually the first time that a compact (or bridge) truly records in HD (1240 x 720 pixels) in 30 images / s with an optical zoom, sound and autofocus.  The bad news is that quality isn’t up to par and precision is almost equivalent to a normal 640 x 480 pixel format.  Moreover, videos suffer from slight overexposure and high compression.  Unfortunately, on a Full HD screen (video is rescaled in 1920 x 1080) all defects are visible.  On the other hand, photos better take advantage of the transition to HD with a display optimized in 1920 x 1080 pixels. Finally, to look at your videos/photos in HD, you will have to look for a station with a non-HDMI input (a strange choice, in our opinion) which will cost you an additional 99 Euros.