Kodak DC240 Zoom

The digital camera market has moved on apace since the Kodak DC210 Plus won the Value award in our Labs in issue 51. Cameras like the Canon PowerShot Pro 70 (reviewed issue 54, p172) are now producing results that rival the best 35mm and APS models, albeit at the high price of £999. There have also been some interesting offerings in the sub-£600 market, with the Olympus Camedia C-900 Zoom (reviewed issue 54, p174) and Casio QV-7000SX (reviewed issue 52, p180) both providing good image quality without breaking the bank. Kodak hopes that its DC240, replacing the old DC220, will build on the DC210's success.

Like the Olympus and Casio, the Kodak DC240 offers 1.3 megapixel picture resolution, made up of 1,280 x 960 pixels. According to Kodak, this is enough to produce a photorealistic 7 x 5in photo, but an uncompressed picture at this resolution would take up around 3.9Mb of space - half of the 8Mb Flash card that Kodak provides with the camera. For this reason photos are automatically compressed into JPEG format, allowing around 19 images to be saved on the Flash card, increasing to 56 images when the resolution is brought down to 640 x 480.

However, this compression results in mixed blessings. As part of our digital cameras test procedure we take a photo of a nearby clock tower in order to gauge how well the camera can capture detail. This depends on two key factors: the quality of the CCD (charge-coupled device), which captures the image, and the DSP (digital signal processor), which adjusts contrast and compresses the file. Previous experience suggests that Kodak's CCD technology is one of the best, but in the DC240's case something has gone wrong in the signal processing. In our clock tower test, we instantly detected a loss of quality around the edges of the tower, which became even clearer once we used Photoshop to zoom further into the image. There were vivid artefacts, with ugly blocks of uneven shading visible. That might be expected from a low-budget digital camera, but not from one at this price.

However, there are areas where the DC240 does show its class - for example, it captures colour extremely well. In addition, the camera's best feature is its excellent 3x optical zoom. Many digital cameras offer only digital zoom, which doesn't increase the image quality but merely enlarges the image in the same way you would zoom in with a bitmap photo-editing package. With the optical zoom, however, I could capture the same amount of detail on the clockface image that I would expect from the PowerShot Pro 70, if not more, and this goes some way to justify the £426 price tag.

While concentrating on the DC240's good points, I should mention its sensible design and ease of use. The controls on the top are all self-explanatory, and you simply make sure the dial at the back of the machine is set to capture before pressing the fire button. The camera is also quick to power up, taking 2.5 seconds, although once you've taken a picture you'll have to wait several seconds before the camera is ready to take another. The friendly GUI gives access to an array of options, including altering exposure compensation, image quality and special effects, such as borders and sepia. This is exactly the sort of thing that brings digital cameras out of the hands of experts and into those of the average high-street buyer.

The friendly interface extends to your PC. Kodak Picture It 3.1 is bundled for transferring photos, along with Adobe's PhotoDeluxe 1 business edition and PageMill. For physically connecting the camera to your PC, Kodak usefully includes both a serial cable and a USB cable. If your computer has USB ports and runs Windows 98, this is the best option for connecting: transferring seven photos totalling 1.3Mb in size took almost five minutes using the serial cable, compared to just 90 seconds via USB. But it's not all good news. The placing of the LCD preview screen is dubious - flush to the left-hand side of the camera. Try as I might, I couldn't avoid touching the screen as I looked through the viewfinder. The design of the lens cap is another cause for concern, as a slight knock almost always dislodged it. I was also initially concerned by the fact that the DC240 uses rechargeable AA batteries rather than a lithium ion battery, but as these lasted for over a hundred photos on one charge, there's not much cause for complaint.