Koda Easyshare C180

[garywharvey]

You just reviewed a Kodak C180 and pretty well tore it apart especially on the image quality. Digital Camera Essentials reviewed the same camera in a group test and it came out as the best in sub £100 compacts.....Quote "A great compact that we'd recommend to anyone" ..."Winning where it counts especially on image quality"..... is this a case of you guys getting a 'bad one' or being too 'snobby' to realise not everyone can afford 'badges' or several hundred pounds to take what to them are acceptable snaps? As now a keen amateur (and previously the company photographer for Rolls-Royce) I tend to know my way around a camera and the results, I often carry a Kodak M320 just incase, some sad people like me feel we have to have a camera on us! The results often are so, so much better than you would expect for that price, yes I can find faults, but I could find faults with the best on the market and very, very often this little cheap camera has exceeded anything I could have expected of it turning in what to most people would be sharp, well saturated and beautifully coloured shots. Please don't go down the 'snob' route with your mag, most people have to pay for their cameras and paying for a 'name' isn't relevent to them.

[Keitht]

I haven't read the review so can't comment directly on that. What I would say is that DP tends to cater for the 'advanced amateur' (whatever that actually means ) and then toward the semi-pro, pro end of the market. What is considered by another magazine to be 'A great compact' won't necessarily meet the standards demanded of another.
Not being in the least 'snobby', but being the winner of a sub £100 group test doesn't make it a great camera or give it great image quality. Great for the price possibly. Just as an old Lada or Trabant would eventually get you from A to B cheaply, they weren't great cars.

[rodlawton]

I didn't write either review, but I am a reviewer so I can understand the dilemmas faced by magazines and writers.

Reviews have to be written in the context of the magazine and its readership, any other products in the same group test and other products in the same market sector. A group test of sub-£100 compacts will inevitably apply different standards to a standalone review in a magazine for photo enthusiasts. There's no snobbery involved; magazine reviews are a sincere attempt to give a specific set of readers the information they demand in order to make a choice.

You could reasonably argue that every compact camera delivers perfectly adequate results, including the Kodak, but saying so doesn't help anyone because what they really want to know is which one is the best. This means identifying and highlighting weaknesses, and this does sometimes upset users who don't consider these weaknesses particularly serious or feel a strong loyalty to a particular brand or model.

The other issue is that people have different standards. Many may feel that the results from a cheap compact are perfectly adequate, and so they might be - for them. Others will disagree, and will waste no time in saying so.

Rod Lawton www.photo-facts.com

[garywharvey]

Hi Guys, Thank you for the two responses but the point I am making is that it is the SAME magazine (this one) that rates it No 1 in one issue and then slates it in another issue, I repeat the same magazine. So either their tests are very innacurate or some of their testers are very biased one or the other......

[matttuffin]

Hi Gary,

thanks for the e-mail. In Digital Camera Essentials we treat standalone reviews and grouptests differently, as the grouptests have a particular criteria to fulfil such as being under £100 or having the best low light performance. As those cameras are judged within the sphere of those aspects and not in the more general terms of a separate review, in which the camera has to stand on it's on merits rather than being the best of a bunch, it often happens that a camera which does well in a grouptest doesn't do quite as well in a standalone review.

We also try to insure a grouptest and standalone review are written by different people to insure more than one opinion is given, as I have writers who are professional photographers, amateurs, men, women, young and old, all of which take a different spin on the camera put in front of them. Because of this I try to avoid any possible 'snobbery' by giving the lower end compacts to non-pro photographers to be as close as possible to the intended audience of that model.

in the case of the Kodak C180 it performed very well in the under £100 grouptest simply because it was the best of that particular bunch, where as in the standalone review the merits of the camera weren't as impressive.

I hope this clears things up for you, if not by all means drop me a mail.

Cheers,

Matt

[garywharvey]

Thanks Matt,

I understand your point. I suppose I am a little sensitive to all the 'badge' hype around on cameras as when Rolls-Royce paid for the best Nikon and lenses in their day for me to use and I often 'outshot' the results with my old Practica manual with a Zeiss lens on the front I found that sometimes the 'expected best' falls short in reality. It was not that the 'no expense spared' option was defficient, it was just that as is so often the case the difference was trivial or did not justify the price/reputation/perception equation. I have found this with many cameras since. I enjoy screwing the absolute best out of equipement that simply should not handle the photographic situations I stretch it to and I am often suprised by the camera in question doing a good job when it should have been completely overwhelmed. The little Kodak so often falls into the latter 'my god it managed that and gave me a good pic' catergory whilst a recently bought and returned Panasonic Lumix FZ28 supposedly a much better camera failed an uncomfortable number of times between otherwise excellent shots to deliver.... next on my desire list is the Fuji F200 EXR, when my pennies mount up to a purchase I hope I'm as impressed with the results as the testers seem to be.....

regards, Gary.