Kodak DC265 Zoom

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.

Author: Tim Danton