Product Reviews

The life expectancy of digital cameras is getting shorter by the month. Just ten months after releasing the DC260 (reviewed issue 47, p160), Kodak is retiring its high-end model in favour of the DC265.

The DC260's short lifespan saw several hotshots produced by Kodak's rivals, most notably the Canon PowerShot Pro 70 (reviewed issue 54, p172), now with a street price of £899, which produced the best images we've seen from a digital camera. Even better value for money now is the Minolta DimÅge Ex Zoom 1500 (reviewed issue 53, p177), which comes second only to the Canon in terms of picture quality and can now be had for a mere £425.

In terms of appearance and ease of use, the DC265 is virtually identical to the DC260, with Kodak opting for the same industrial-looking chassis. Although it appears cumbersome, it is generally well-designed and easy to hold. However, because it is so different to a standard compact it may take some getting used to.

The viewfinder is placed sensibly, flush to the left-hand side of the camera, and the LCD panel to its right is large enough to give you a good idea of what your photos will look like, especially if you use the magnify option to zoom in when reviewing them.

The LCD is also home to Kodak's cheerful graphical interface, which offers a comprehensive list of options. It allows you to add watermarks such as your company logo to pictures, file photos into different albums within the camera, and provides access to advanced functions like 'long time' exposure and the external flash sync control. There are three basic picture types to choose from: still, burst - taking a quick series of photographs but with no flash - and time-lapse mode, which allows you to set the camera to take a picture at regular intervals up to 24 hours apart. Another neat feature retained from the DC260 is the ability to attach sound recordings to photos via a small microphone built into the back of the camera.

At the DC265's

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heart is a 1.6 megapixel CCD, which gives a maximum image resolution of 1,536 x 1,024 pixels. If you take an uncompressed photo at this resolution it will consume around 5Mb of space, so Kodak is left with the problem of how to compress photos without losing too much quality. The DC240 (reviewed issue 56, p179) was criticised for compressing photos by a factor of 13:1 to fit 19 photos on to an 8Mb Flash card. The DC265 fares a little better, but the minimum level of compression is still around 10:1. In my experience, if you compress photos by anything more than 7:1, you do so at the risk of quality. One of our tests is to photograph a local clock tower and then use Photoshop to zoom in and inspect it close up. As the samples above show, the Minolta still managed to look good, while the DC265's photo has lost a lot of its definition. It certainly doesn't compete with the Pro 70 despite its similar resolution.

It's good to see that there's control over the file format, with options for storing pictures in JPEG or FlashPix formats. But even though the FlashPix files were twice the size of the equivalent JPEG ones, there was only a slight difference in the image quality. The main difference was that the FlashPix images had slightly sharper edges. The DC265 also gives some control over picture size and quality, with in-camera options of Good, Better and Best image - I'd recommend sticking to Best at all times. Resolution can also be set to Standard (768 x 512), Medium (1,152 x 768) or High (1,536 x 1,024).

As you'd expect at this price point, the DC265 has a 3x optical zoom, which goes some way to making up for the compression problems. There's also a 2x digital zoom to boost this further, but this simply mimics what you can do with any decent photo manipulation program. Kodak has also thrown in Adobe PhotoDeluxe Business Edition, an easy-to-use but fairly basic photo-editing package.

Transferring photos from the camera to your PC is made easier than most by Kodak's well-designed PictureIt software and a USB connection. If you don't have USB, there's still the serial connection and infrared port, but pictures will take a good deal longer to transfer.

There's no doubt that Kodak knows how to make good cameras, but when compared to its competitors you can't help but be disappointed by the DC265. By making compression so high at the expense of photo quality, Kodak falls behind in the digital camera race. As such, I'd hesitate to recommend you spend this much money on the DC265 when you can buy the Minolta for so much less.