Labs

The CX6230 is a bit larger than its competitors, and has a rather chunky, simple design, which gives it an old-fashioned Box Brownie feel. It comes neatly packaged in a nice yellow box, inside which is more printed paper devoted to selling you accessories than describing the camera. Luckily, functions are easily explored using the joypad under your left thumb. Rather than tiny text and icons superimposed on the image preview, Kodak prefers full-screen messages to tell you what mode you're in or what option you've just set. This is friendly at first, but can get irritating. Although menus look very sharp and clear on the LCD, images don't - especially in low light.

We have no complaints about the basics, but the CX6230 doesn't go a bundle

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on extras. You can't override exposure or white balance, although there's a Night Scene mode to extend the skimpy 1/30 second maximum exposure to half a second. In playback mode, images come up reasonably quickly, but at high resolution the display resorts to showing a quarter-size thumbnail if you try to speed-step through your shots. You can rotate through your images as a slide show at a user-defined speed, either on the LCD or by hooking up the camera to your PC, but you can't choose which pics are shown or in what order.

Kodak's reputation for image quality has nothing to fear from the CX6230. Both indoors and out, results were sharp, clear and vibrant without being oversaturated. In fact, the CX6230 proves that resolution isn't everything. Enlarged to a resolution of 2048x1536, some of the outdoor shots taken with the 2-megapixel Kodak actually looked better than those taken with the 3.2-megapixel HP camera.

It's hard to recommend a 2-megapixel camera in this day and age. Although the macro mode gets you pretty close to your subject, it still can't capture as much detail as the HP or Canon, and the same failing is inevitable in any shot with lots of foreground action. If your budget is really tight, though, you'd be far better going for this good 2-megapixel camera rather than a cheap 3-megapixel alternative.