Kodak Easyshare Sport C123

You won't find many waterproof cameras selling for under £200 and even less for under £150! So what can we expect from the Kodak Easyshare Sport C123—a camera that's waterproof to three metres and sells for £50 to £80? Well, as you'd probably already guessed, it's a basic camera. It has a 12-Megapixel sensor, a unifocal lens (fixed focal length, i.e. no optical zoom) and runs on AA batteries.

Handling

There are two ways of looking at things: you could say that the Kodak Sport is a lump of plastic made from melted down Playmobil cars and that it feels a bit like a toy; or you could say that it's made from hard and reassuringly thick plastic that's sure to be sturdy. Although the low-cost plastics aren't particularly flattering, the chunky handle with rubber grip helps you keep hold of the camera nicely, even when your thumb's busy pressing the rubbery buttons on the back. It's also pretty good for kids' little hands to grab onto.

The camera's design is simple. In fact, you'll only really need to use the buttons on the top edge of the camera for day-to-day use (on/off, shooting mode, flash). The zoom should be avoided like the plague (see inset) and you won't need to go into the clear, concise menus very often.


There is, however, one problem. Aside from the shiny black plastic that picks up fingerprints on the back of the camera, the screen is really quite poor quality. A poor gamma means that grey shades look too dark and the average deltaE of 13 means that colours aren't reproduced accurately (accurate colours = deltaE of under 3, most compacts usually score somewhere around 7). Similarly, the LCD has ridiculously tight viewing angles, particularly from below. Then again, we were pretty much expecting that, given how much (or little) the camera costs. It gets worse though, as the cherry on this rather unappetising cake is a definition of 112,000 dots. The grid of underling pixels is therefore only too visible, even when holding the camera at arm's length.

Responsiveness

Given the way the display lags so painfully, we weren't expecting this camera to be particularly fast, as that's often a sign of a slow processor. However, this Kodak camera really wasn't as bad as expected. OK, so the C123 takes two and a half seconds to start up, which is particularly lethargic seeing as there's no zoom lens to pop out and no other mechanical operations to perform, but the photo-to-photo turnaround time is under one and a half seconds.


What's even more impressive is that this little snapper takes a photo as quickly as the best digital cameras out there. This, however, is because the C123 doesn't have an autofocus—its lens is fixed at the hyperfocal distance, like the 'snapshot' mode seen in certain Ricoh compacts. That suddenly makes things seem a lot less impressive, as it takes the camera 0.3 seconds to ... release the shutter and nothing more. Nevertheless, it still takes pictures quickly so you won't miss out on the action.

Picture Quality

There's nothing special about the 12-Megapixel sensor in the C123—it's a run-of-the-mill 1/2.3" CCD that's been seen in plenty of compact cameras already.



So why does the camera perform so poorly in our ISO settings test? This probably has a lot to do with the built-in processor. Modern cameras use very advanced image processing algorithms to make sure pictures come out looking decent, even if the photosites packed onto the sensor are very small and don't capture all that much light.

Here, the image processing system is very basic. At 200 ISO noise is visible on 8" x 10" (20 x 27 cm) pictures. It stays at about the same level at 400 ISO, except that here it's coupled with visible smoothing, even if that's not too much of a problem yet. At 800 ISO quality takes a nosedive, as smoothing wipes out pretty much any detail in the shot. In fact, you couldn't even print a decent-looking 800x600-pixel picture!


As for the lens, the centre of the image is good enough quality for an 8" x 10" print (20 x 27 cm), so long as you don't look at it too closely—don't forget that our ISO test shots are shown at 100% size, which is equivalent to a 10" x 13" (25 x 33 cm) print. The edges of shots, however, look blurred on anything above a 4" x 6" (11 x 15 cm) print.

All in all, we've definitely seen worse picture quality—in the Sigmatek SDC-350p, Nintendo DSi and some mobile phones, for example. That said, out of the hundreds of cameras that have been put through their paces in our labs, the Kodak Sport still has to be one of the ten worst.

Video

The Kodak Sport C123 films in VGA resolution. That automatically eliminates any hopes of a third star for this camera, as 720p is really the lowest acceptable video resolution for a compact these days.


The video image is very highly contrasted. Any shadows, shade or dark areas are flooded to black and bright areas are overexposed—although we've seen worse in that field. Fuzzy noise is visible in mid-tone colours and a moiré effect can be seen in certain patterned areas, such as the black and white fabric squares in the bottom right corner of the test scene.

The sound is obviously mono rather than stereo and is very fuzzy. Background noise is picked up too strongly, and the various sounds are crushed and muddled, making voices barely intelligible as soon as there's the slightest bit of unwanted background noise. All in all then, it's not great.