Kodak Easyshare M583

As the name implies, Kodak has gone down the simple route with the M583, and done a good job of it too. This nicely designed piano-black camera eschews manual modes in favour of four groups of scene selections.

As befits Kodak Eastman, you can pick classic film treatments as well as the usual close-up, night portraits, landscape and similar scenes.

The 8X Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon zoom on the M583 provides a respectable 224mm tele reach, and 28mm wide angle in 35mm terms – the maximum apertures are not specified, but testing showed them to be f/3.2 (wide) and f/5.7 (tele).

Despite this lens, image stabilisation and 14.1megapixel sensor, the M583 is the cheapest camera in our 2011 travel-zoom camera roundup. Even so, the low price and focus on ease of use doesn't mean image quality suffers. The M583 is capable of very good still pictures that are sharp with punchy colour. In daylight, when the camera turns down the sensor to ISO 64, pictures are nicely noise-free.

The auto-focus on the camera works well too. Not so good: 720p videos are noisy and suffer from juddering. Also, the 230k-dot LCD is a couple of generations behind current screens.

Kodak decided to use microSD memory cards to store images on the M583. These tend to be slower than bigger SD cards, but the M583 performed fairly well with no undue waits while the camera wrote image files to memory.

The Share button makes it simple to post images on social media sites such as Facebook, giving a clue at who the M583 is aimed: this point-and-shooter that doesn’t require lots of photography knowledge to produce good results.

Kodak’s ease of use formula works well in the M583 while producing good still images. Video quality could be better though.