Kodak Easyshare Touch M577

Cameras in the £80 to £150 price range are slowly catching up with more expensive models, but competition in the budget sector is tough and it's not always easy for manufacturers to stand out from the crowd when they're on tight budgets. However, with a wide-angle lens (a must-have these days), a good-quality build and a high-definition touchscreen, Kodak's Easyshare Touch M577 is currently a pretty unique camera in the low-cost sector.

Handling

Entry-level cameras often have a fairly basic build, an approximative assembly and hard, grainy plastics worthy of an old TV or a Playmobil toy. There's none of that here though, as both the front and the back of this Kodak camera have been carefully made with lacquered plastics that really bring a look and feel of quality to the camera. Obviously, this smooth finish makes the Easyshare Touch a bit slippery, and there's no grip or handle for your fingers to hang onto. Plus, the shiny casing is a bit of a fingerprint magnet. That said, there are a few slightly questionable design choices, such as the chrome-effect band of bling running between the front and back casings, but in spite of that, it's been a while since we've seen this level of quality in a budget camera.


This Easyshare Touch does have a few annoying features. The vertical -moving zoom control on the back of the camera, for example, isn't particularly comfortable to use, and since there are no raised areas or grips to rest your fingers on, it's pretty much impossible to zoom without holding the camera in two hands. Similarly, the shutter-release button and the on/off button are quite long, slightly raised and very sensitive, which means that we often found ourselves taking a photo or switching the camera on accidentally when removing the memory card from the compartment on the underside of the camera.

The screen has a decent definition of 460,000 dots and is touch-sensitive, which is still quite rare in an entry-level camera. The only downside is that the screen uses TN technology, and so the display looks black if you view at it from below (you won't be able to see what you're doing taking a shot above your head, for example). This camera refused point blank to read any of our test images (unlike the Kodak C123 and Z990 we're also testing at the moment) so we weren't able to measure the screen's contrast or colour fidelity.

We have a few mixed feelings about this camera's interface. On the one hand, its clear, graphically stylish and has a few nice animations and stylish transparent effects. On the other hand, the processor doesn't quite seem to be able to keep up, and sometimes there's a noticeable lag between entering a command and the camera responding. If you press the settings icon (flash, self-timer etc.), for example, the menu takes a full second to display. You also have to make sure you press the various options straight on, otherwise the camera often thinks you're trying to scroll through the list. On the whole though, it's really not a bad attempt at a touchscreen interface, it just needs to be a bit more responsive to be entirely satisfactory.

Responsiveness

The Kodak Easyshare Touch is pretty average in this field. You'll have to wait 1.7 seconds to take your first photo, 1.5 seconds between two photos and just under a second for the autofocus to work in most situations. In other words, the Touch M577 is neither incredibly fast nor incredibly slow.


These figures don't tell the full story, though. Switching to playback mode after taking a photo, for example, takes several seconds and a 'Please Wait' message is even displayed. Similarly, taking three photos in a row can be problematic, as the first two shots are taken 1.5 seconds apart but the camera then freezes up for the time it takes to save the two shots, taking the third photo a whole four seconds later. If, in your impatience or surprise, you accidentally press the shutter-release button again, the camera will take a fourth photo, in what can be a good few seconds after you actually pressed the button. And if you want to confuse things even more by switching to playback mode to view back the series of shots, you'll have to wait until it's finished saving all four photos before you can do so, with the last saved photo displayed five to six seconds after you press the playback button.

Picture Quality

Technically speaking, the Touch M577 has the bare minimum specs for a digital camera these days, with a 14-Megapixel CCD and a 5x zoom lens with a wide-angle setting of 28 mm.



The camera's performance at its various ISO settings hold no real surprise. All is well up to 200 ISO, but from 400 ISO smoothing starts to appear on 8" x 10 " photos (20 x 27 cm). At 800 ISO, noise and smoothing are both problematic, even on 4" x 6" photos (11 x 15 cm) or when viewing shots back on a computer screen. As a result 800 ISO is best avoided, as are higher settings, at which the whole image is drowned in fuzzy noise.


The lens isn't any more impressive either. At wide-angle settings shots are reasonably sharp in the middle but nothing more, as finer details don't come out as accurately as in some higher-end cameras. Similarly, at wide-angle settings the edges of the frame are visibly blurred—something you'll notice on 4" x 6 " prints (11 x 15 cm), as you can see in the example above. At telephoto settings the whole frame looks hazy but the edges are still more blurred than the middle of the shot.

Note that there's no stabilisation system in this camera. With a lens that's relatively slow (f/3.9 at wide angle or f/5.7 at the maximum zoom setting) and with no stabilisation, we had to push all the way up to 1600 ISO (1/25 of a second) to get a consistently clear shot of Barbie. Needless to say, this has a serious impact on image quality!

Video

Like most entry-level compacts, the M577 films 720p HD video with mono sound. The sound is muffled and isn't very good quality, with voices that are soon drowned out by unwanted background noise (like the little train in our video test sequence).

The image is too highly contrasted with overexposed light tones and dark areas that block together into one big, dark mass. There's plenty of noise in darker areas plus there's no optical zoom, just a terrible digital zoom function that wipes out detail and makes things even fuzzier.