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Kodak EasyShare Z8612IS 8.1MP Digital Camera with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom
See it at Amazon.com for $188.99Average Customer Rating
(4.0 out of 5)
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Another Great Kodak Camera
(5 out of 5) by Alexis J. on Jun 24, 2008 (Illinois)I have only had the camera for a couple of days and I'm already very pleased with it. Takes wonderful pictures right out of the box in the Auto mode, but there are many different features that I will have to play around with. The 12x zoom is perfect for catching objects from a distance and the Image Stabilizer works wonders. I have tried to shake the camer while taking the picture and it has still came out great.
A few things to know before buying: The camera does not have an electronic viewfinder, so sometimes in direct light(sun)it may be hard to view the LCD screen. It also uses 3 different types of batteries KLIC-8000 (rechargeable Li Ion), CRV3 (Non rechargeable Li Ion), and it also takes 2 AA litium Ion batteries. If you buy the KLIC-8000 battery you have to purchase a separate charger, you cannot charge the battery in the camera. If you are looking for a big zoom camera that will fit in your pocket this is not the camera for you.
A few things to know before buying: The camera does not have an electronic viewfinder, so sometimes in direct light(sun)it may be hard to view the LCD screen. It also uses 3 different types of batteries KLIC-8000 (rechargeable Li Ion), CRV3 (Non rechargeable Li Ion), and it also takes 2 AA litium Ion batteries. If you buy the KLIC-8000 battery you have to purchase a separate charger, you cannot charge the battery in the camera. If you are looking for a big zoom camera that will fit in your pocket this is not the camera for you.
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Pleasantly Surprised
(5 out of 5) by T. BOND on Feb 16, 2009 (Columbia, MO)I orginally wrote this review after using the camera for only a few hours because I found that I liked it a lot. Several weeks later I still stand by the review. They've tried to pack as much basic camera into as few dollars as possible and IMHO they've done a good job. They've also included enough old-school professional grade features to let someone who understands f-stops, shutter speeds and depth-of-field to play with that a little.
Megapixels don't mean much anymore without the glass to support a good image and the glass on this one seems pretty good (Schneider-KRUEZNACH). The glass doesn't fill up the whole width of the lens barrel you see in the picture. Some of that width is probably for the optics of the zoom and possibly appearance. There's more and better glass however, than your typical point-and-shoot. I'm surprised how clear a picture I can get with 8.1 mega pixels. I just blew my best picture up on a 46 inch 1080p big screen TV and, even at this size, I can zoom in quite a bit before it breaks down. For me it's worth having a boxy shape that won't fit in my pocket to get a good zoom and good glass. The zoom is surprisingly variable too. It doesn't confine you to half-dozen or so preset stages, so you can frame the image as you'd like. Without preset stages, however, it wants to refocus each time you change the zoom, so it's not a continuous image and you have to be willing to put up with a moment of blur.
The focusing system itself is great. It works on some kind of grid system and it decides which part of the picture is relevant, outlines the parts of the grid it's using to focus and sets the lens. I love it! It does a pretty good job of picking the relevant detail, and you can aim it elsewhere and hold down the button if you want to tell it to focus on something else.
If you like pushing the limits of what can be done with ambient light, this camera is better than a typical pocket point and shoot. (Due to the extra glass) Even in a dark living room lit by a 60-watt incadescent light bulb and two north windows, I was able to get a super dense/detailed picture of my kid, which I'm very happy with, using no flash. (The camera picked a 1/40 shutter speed.) In the same room, with no light on, I zoomed in on my dog from 9 feet away and the camera took an awfully good picture at 1/6 of a sec. Again, I was leaning against something, but -- at a sixth -- the image stabilization had to be working overtime to preserve the sharpness it did. Zooming in all the way, showed it wasn't quite as sharp as my second picture with a flash, but it was easily good enough to blow-up on 1080p TV. And it was better, of course, because it didn't have that "flat" look that comes with using a flash. For a camera under $700 I thought it did extremely well with low light ... and I suppose one could always use the flash.
One aspect of photography is the fleeting nature of any image you might try to capture. At this price I can't get a rapid refresh between pictures, but what I did get with the Z8612 is a camera that captures the image immediately - the image or facial expression I actually saw - without the digital pause. I've not found this before in consumer-grade digital cameras and for me that was really important. Some have objected to the automatic lens cap release, but I really like the "ready to shoot" concept in that design. You hit the power button and "bing" the lens cap pops off, the lens shoots forward and the flash (if you want it) is ready to go.
Some reviews have commented the battery that shipped with the camera didn't last long at all, and I found that to be the case as well. The AA lithiums I replaced it with have lasted fairly well and it took a while to go through the first pair. I may upgrade to the official rechargeable unit, but these are pretty cheap.
I only bought this camera because I lost a Samsung 10 mpix NV11 but I'm glad I did. That was a nice (more expensive) consumer camera, with good reviews, and the array of buttons was neat, but the Kodak just seems to be designed better. The wider glass handles low light better; the images are as good or better even though it has fewer pixels, the image is truer to what I saw because the electronic delay kicks in AFTER the camera captures the shot, the zoom is more versatile and more powerful - again better glass - it's easier to learn, the color handling is good, the focus is more responsive and informative, and I can load images on my computer without installing any software. With the Kodak, I also get the sense of something designed by camera people and, for me, that difference has turned out to mean a lot. For instance, there are fewer buttons yet I can easily dial the EV (darkness/lightness bias) up or down a few stops in the midst of shooting, which is great.
It's kind of a gimick I guess, but they throw in a camera mode that intelligently stitches together several pictures into one panoramic view. I've not had that before and I was kind of "blown away" at first. With your help, it seems to sense how to line up appropriate edges when it can. You have to admire the software team that pulled that off.
Note that this camera does NOT have a range finder (i.e. a look-through port at the top of the camera). For me the design and lens quality took the sting out of that, but if that doesn't work for you, you may want to look at the Kodak Z1015 IS for an extra $90. I haven't tried that camera.
This is, by no means, the $1,200 EOS SLR I'm currently drooling over but, for me, it captures enough of the SLR experience to ease those cravings for now. Carrying this simple, boxy-looking camera around is an exercise in humility but, on the other hand, it doesn't shout "steal me" when you set it down somewhere. It does seem to capture enough of the things a photographer needs that I don't feel like I have to sacrifice something to go from film to digital even though I'm buying a budget camera. At the time I bought it, retailers were dropping like flies and the camera was going for something over $150 and I felt very, very fortunate to get this much camera for the price I paid, as I still do today. Apparently others agree as the demand has grown and the price has risen quite a bit.
Megapixels don't mean much anymore without the glass to support a good image and the glass on this one seems pretty good (Schneider-KRUEZNACH). The glass doesn't fill up the whole width of the lens barrel you see in the picture. Some of that width is probably for the optics of the zoom and possibly appearance. There's more and better glass however, than your typical point-and-shoot. I'm surprised how clear a picture I can get with 8.1 mega pixels. I just blew my best picture up on a 46 inch 1080p big screen TV and, even at this size, I can zoom in quite a bit before it breaks down. For me it's worth having a boxy shape that won't fit in my pocket to get a good zoom and good glass. The zoom is surprisingly variable too. It doesn't confine you to half-dozen or so preset stages, so you can frame the image as you'd like. Without preset stages, however, it wants to refocus each time you change the zoom, so it's not a continuous image and you have to be willing to put up with a moment of blur.
The focusing system itself is great. It works on some kind of grid system and it decides which part of the picture is relevant, outlines the parts of the grid it's using to focus and sets the lens. I love it! It does a pretty good job of picking the relevant detail, and you can aim it elsewhere and hold down the button if you want to tell it to focus on something else.
If you like pushing the limits of what can be done with ambient light, this camera is better than a typical pocket point and shoot. (Due to the extra glass) Even in a dark living room lit by a 60-watt incadescent light bulb and two north windows, I was able to get a super dense/detailed picture of my kid, which I'm very happy with, using no flash. (The camera picked a 1/40 shutter speed.) In the same room, with no light on, I zoomed in on my dog from 9 feet away and the camera took an awfully good picture at 1/6 of a sec. Again, I was leaning against something, but -- at a sixth -- the image stabilization had to be working overtime to preserve the sharpness it did. Zooming in all the way, showed it wasn't quite as sharp as my second picture with a flash, but it was easily good enough to blow-up on 1080p TV. And it was better, of course, because it didn't have that "flat" look that comes with using a flash. For a camera under $700 I thought it did extremely well with low light ... and I suppose one could always use the flash.
One aspect of photography is the fleeting nature of any image you might try to capture. At this price I can't get a rapid refresh between pictures, but what I did get with the Z8612 is a camera that captures the image immediately - the image or facial expression I actually saw - without the digital pause. I've not found this before in consumer-grade digital cameras and for me that was really important. Some have objected to the automatic lens cap release, but I really like the "ready to shoot" concept in that design. You hit the power button and "bing" the lens cap pops off, the lens shoots forward and the flash (if you want it) is ready to go.
Some reviews have commented the battery that shipped with the camera didn't last long at all, and I found that to be the case as well. The AA lithiums I replaced it with have lasted fairly well and it took a while to go through the first pair. I may upgrade to the official rechargeable unit, but these are pretty cheap.
I only bought this camera because I lost a Samsung 10 mpix NV11 but I'm glad I did. That was a nice (more expensive) consumer camera, with good reviews, and the array of buttons was neat, but the Kodak just seems to be designed better. The wider glass handles low light better; the images are as good or better even though it has fewer pixels, the image is truer to what I saw because the electronic delay kicks in AFTER the camera captures the shot, the zoom is more versatile and more powerful - again better glass - it's easier to learn, the color handling is good, the focus is more responsive and informative, and I can load images on my computer without installing any software. With the Kodak, I also get the sense of something designed by camera people and, for me, that difference has turned out to mean a lot. For instance, there are fewer buttons yet I can easily dial the EV (darkness/lightness bias) up or down a few stops in the midst of shooting, which is great.
It's kind of a gimick I guess, but they throw in a camera mode that intelligently stitches together several pictures into one panoramic view. I've not had that before and I was kind of "blown away" at first. With your help, it seems to sense how to line up appropriate edges when it can. You have to admire the software team that pulled that off.
Note that this camera does NOT have a range finder (i.e. a look-through port at the top of the camera). For me the design and lens quality took the sting out of that, but if that doesn't work for you, you may want to look at the Kodak Z1015 IS for an extra $90. I haven't tried that camera.
This is, by no means, the $1,200 EOS SLR I'm currently drooling over but, for me, it captures enough of the SLR experience to ease those cravings for now. Carrying this simple, boxy-looking camera around is an exercise in humility but, on the other hand, it doesn't shout "steal me" when you set it down somewhere. It does seem to capture enough of the things a photographer needs that I don't feel like I have to sacrifice something to go from film to digital even though I'm buying a budget camera. At the time I bought it, retailers were dropping like flies and the camera was going for something over $150 and I felt very, very fortunate to get this much camera for the price I paid, as I still do today. Apparently others agree as the demand has grown and the price has risen quite a bit.
101 of 123 people found the following review helpful:
Do not buy this camera!
(1 out of 5) by Keith on Nov 25, 2008 (Portland, Oregon)I made the mistake of buying this camera sight unseen and without reading the reviews.
First, the good: takes wonderful pictures. I had an olympus 3.2mp 10x optical zoom camera. this one beats it in all modes I've tried including the super macro setting for ultra close ups.
Having said that, the engineers who designed this screwed the pooch so badly they need to be shot, hung, drawn and quartered, and their heads put on a pike. Same goes for the marketing morons who specified this product.
It takes 2 AA batteries. It eats them. Nope, rechargeable Nimh won't work. Not even the high capacity ones; too much power draw. You MUST use the lithium ion ones. Yeah, the $2 each AA lithium battery. Stupid engineers.
The reason it eats them is the large LCD display on the back is the ONLY way to take a picture; there is no viewfinder. Stupid engineers. The LCD washes out easily.
Second, the delay time to store the picture is ridiculous. I've tried faster SD cards to no avail. If you want to take more than 3 pictures within 10 seconds (count to 10; it's a long time...), this is not your camera.
And the lens cap always comes off. WTF?? I've owned a number of cameras; expensive, cheap, and moderate, and never been so disgusted with their inability to execute on this simple thing. It's like they put their worst guys on this camera. Really, how hard is it to make a camera and lens cap that stays on? If Boeing designed things this poorly, planes would be falling out of the sky. The lens is one of the most important parts of the camera and it's at high risk of getting scratched with no lens cap.. Stupid engineers.
There are other issues with this camera, but those are the biggies.
Don't buy this camera. There are other cameras out there where you don't have to make the tradeoffs this one requires of you.
First, the good: takes wonderful pictures. I had an olympus 3.2mp 10x optical zoom camera. this one beats it in all modes I've tried including the super macro setting for ultra close ups.
Having said that, the engineers who designed this screwed the pooch so badly they need to be shot, hung, drawn and quartered, and their heads put on a pike. Same goes for the marketing morons who specified this product.
It takes 2 AA batteries. It eats them. Nope, rechargeable Nimh won't work. Not even the high capacity ones; too much power draw. You MUST use the lithium ion ones. Yeah, the $2 each AA lithium battery. Stupid engineers.
The reason it eats them is the large LCD display on the back is the ONLY way to take a picture; there is no viewfinder. Stupid engineers. The LCD washes out easily.
Second, the delay time to store the picture is ridiculous. I've tried faster SD cards to no avail. If you want to take more than 3 pictures within 10 seconds (count to 10; it's a long time...), this is not your camera.
And the lens cap always comes off. WTF?? I've owned a number of cameras; expensive, cheap, and moderate, and never been so disgusted with their inability to execute on this simple thing. It's like they put their worst guys on this camera. Really, how hard is it to make a camera and lens cap that stays on? If Boeing designed things this poorly, planes would be falling out of the sky. The lens is one of the most important parts of the camera and it's at high risk of getting scratched with no lens cap.. Stupid engineers.
There are other issues with this camera, but those are the biggies.
Don't buy this camera. There are other cameras out there where you don't have to make the tradeoffs this one requires of you.
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Digital Camera EasyShare Z8612IS
(5 out of 5) by Dante Diosomito on Aug 28, 2008 (Fl. USA)My first digital Camera was a Nikon who was given to me by my son.I never have a camera before and i got hooked on it by the way of new technology
of Cameras.When this one stopped operating, i knew i have to get another one.Don't get me wrong,this Nikon i had is a good Camera.So then i found
this Kodak EasyShare 8612IS camera the best.After i have search and keep looking that i like, this one is 4.5 to 5 stars.
The quality of pictures are superbs.After i read the instructions,i experiment to take pictures at work,inside and outside the house,the flowers and plants we have around are so beautiful.I made some mistakes of taking pictures because i forgot to change settings on the mode dial.
But most of my shooting came out nice.Also,it takes about 3 sec.in-between takes.Second con,it takes about 8 to 10 secs. to light the 2.5" LCD.
It has a cover for the lens,the lens itself look like an SLR professional camera.Yet it's true that it is not a pocket camera.I bought 4gb sd and will take over one thousands pictures, one hour of video, which i haven't try it yet.It comes with the strap and a battery,you have to buy your own charger. Oh, the battery last longer than expected, over a week. Well, that's when your not taking pictures too much, i guess.
I still have to get familiarized with the features,after all i just have this last 17th,aug08. I love the color a black surface.As other recommended for potential buyers,check it personally,try to feel in your hand if it is comfortable or too big for your fingers to press tiny bottons of each dial.Like i said if you want a pocket camera this one is not for you.By the way the lens is not retractable, permanently protrude.
Gosh!! i did not realized that.But i keep it.
of Cameras.When this one stopped operating, i knew i have to get another one.Don't get me wrong,this Nikon i had is a good Camera.So then i found
this Kodak EasyShare 8612IS camera the best.After i have search and keep looking that i like, this one is 4.5 to 5 stars.
The quality of pictures are superbs.After i read the instructions,i experiment to take pictures at work,inside and outside the house,the flowers and plants we have around are so beautiful.I made some mistakes of taking pictures because i forgot to change settings on the mode dial.
But most of my shooting came out nice.Also,it takes about 3 sec.in-between takes.Second con,it takes about 8 to 10 secs. to light the 2.5" LCD.
It has a cover for the lens,the lens itself look like an SLR professional camera.Yet it's true that it is not a pocket camera.I bought 4gb sd and will take over one thousands pictures, one hour of video, which i haven't try it yet.It comes with the strap and a battery,you have to buy your own charger. Oh, the battery last longer than expected, over a week. Well, that's when your not taking pictures too much, i guess.
I still have to get familiarized with the features,after all i just have this last 17th,aug08. I love the color a black surface.As other recommended for potential buyers,check it personally,try to feel in your hand if it is comfortable or too big for your fingers to press tiny bottons of each dial.Like i said if you want a pocket camera this one is not for you.By the way the lens is not retractable, permanently protrude.
Gosh!! i did not realized that.But i keep it.
35 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
Great buy for the price
(5 out of 5) by Robert I. Brown on May 15, 2008 (Florence, Al)I only got to play with this camera for five minutes at Staples, but expect me to place my order soon. For the price, these features are usually unheard of. The camera shot super clear pictures zoomed completely out or completely in. Rapid-fire shooting rate captures clear images, even when moving fast ( I was rotating in circles to test this out, if you've ever been shopping with me I test every camera I buy completely). My only qualm was that it is built like a traditional 35mm camera, meaning that anyone wanting to stash it in their jeans pocket for stealth shooting may be out of luck. But since I work from my car, this will not be a problem. Definitely a good quality camera that will carry me until I can afford an XSi and beyond.