Product Reviews

The Kodak EasyShare P850 is aimed at photography enthusiasts who can't stretch to the expense of a digital SLR, or who value a 12x optical zoom more than a through-the-lens optical viewfinder.

Big zooms are more susceptible to blur from camera shake, so it's good to see effective optical image stabilisation built in. We managed to take sharp handheld shots at 12x zoom with a 1/40s shutter speed, but it didn't always work well.

The plastic body seems durable and is extremely comfortable to hold. It has an accessory hotshoe and 18 buttons, wheels and dials, including controls

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for focus, metering and drive modes, and a switch that toggles between the 2.5" LCD screen and the 237,000-pixel electronic viewfinder. A magnified picture-in-picture makes manual focusing easier but it's slow to adjust and, despite the mass of buttons, aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings, isn't as quick to access as we'd like. The lens is slow, too, taking five seconds from power-up to extend into position. In low lighting the auto-focus can take up to three seconds, although with manual focus the gap between shots is just over a second.

A 5.1-megapixel sensor may seem under-specified in a £300 camera, but the P850's images seem sharp. In fact, close examination reveals some aggressive digital noise reduction. This works most of the time, but complex images such as brickwork had a smudged appearance. Colour accuracy was high, with vibrant tones and superb automatic exposure, though the white balance modes were often needed to fix colour casts for indoor shots.

We liked the photos produced by the P850, but Canon's PowerShot S2 IS has almost identical specifications, costs the same, is quicker to use and offers marginally better image quality.