Kodak's EasyShare M420 has certainly got what it takes to win over some photographers, featuring a 4x zoom, a 28 mm wide-angle, a 10 Megapixel sensor and an attractive 3'' LCD screen--all for a very reasonable price.  So, is it worth your attention?

Handling

The camera body, which comes in a choice of red, purple, black or silver, is fairly traditional, but by no means ugly.  It's quite thin and well-finished.  The interface is reasonably simple and doesn't include any unnecessary controls.  There's just the bare minimum including a switch for the flash and a mode selector.  The 'i' button provides context-based help for different features, which is a great addition!  When you're lining up your shot, the same button allows you to control exposure, autofocus or set the timer.  The majority of people who buy this camera will probably leave it in automatic mode, but it's still a shame that's the no easy way to adjust the sensitivity without going via a menu.  It would have been a good idea to allow users to choose exactly which settings are controlled using this 'i' control, like you can on Ricoh's compacts.


The zoom control is a little small and controlling it can be tricky.  At three inches, the LCD screen is nice and large, but it's a shame that its resolution doesn't keep up: it's almost certainly 230, 000 pixels, meaning that focusing suffers due to the lack of detail.  The horizontal viewing angles are perfectly fine, but if you try and look at the camera from below, the screen very quickly dips to black.  In low light levels, the display is  blurry, but movement remains fluid, while in bright sunlight, the glossy finish is subject to reflections.

Against the stopwatch, the M420 is satisfactory but nothing exceptional: you can expect to wait at least two seconds to switch it on and then at least three more in between two shots.  Autofocus takes just over a second in most cases.  Other compacts, especially Canon's, are often much faster, but the M420 is a little behind the times.  Another sign of this is that its burst mode only manages 1.3 fps over a burst of three shots.

Image Quality

Even when wide open (f/2.6), the lens on the M420 isn't that great.  Although the centre of the frame is reasonable (which is the least we can can expect), the edges really lack sharpness, despite the fact they have plenty of detail.  We noticed several chromatic aberrations, and above all a lot of purple fringing in zones with a lot of contrast.  One positive feature though is that the wide-angle lens doesn't suffer from too much distortion.


Despite the inclusion of a 10 Megapixel sensor that we're quite familiar with now, the images weren't treated as well as we would have expected.  White balancing was acceptable outside, but veered towards blue under the halogen lamps in our studio.  Noise management was fine up to 200 ISO, but began to lead to coloured spots at 400 ISO and beyond.  Even for 4 x 6" prints, it's best to not go beyond 800 ISO.

Unfortunately, the video mode doesn't include a HD, meaning you'll have to make do with VGA at 30 fps, and you can't use the zoom while recording.  The flash is reasonable, but the macro mode, which stops at 10 cm, leaves something to be desired.  Image stabilisation is reasonable with clear photos at 1/4 second.