Tracey Capen

Kodak EasyShare DX6340

The EasyShare DX6340 costs $330--a great price for a digital camera with a 4X optical zoom lens. Kodak made this point-and-shoot model easy to use by keeping its features relatively simple. A large dial on the back of the DX6340 lets you quickly select one of the camera's five scene modes or its movie mode (which includes sound). And the unit has dedicated buttons for changing the flash setting, turning on the self-timer, and deleting less-than-satisfactory shots, so you don't have to stop and dig through menus to handle those fundamental tasks. A bright-red Share button lets you tag your favorite shots and immediately print or e-mail them the next time you connect to your PC.The camera has a miniature joystick for navigating the short and simple list of menu options. The well-labeled menus display in large-font text, making them easy to read.Add Kodak's $200 EasyShare Printer Dock 6000, and this camera will be a hit at parties. Just 3 inches high, 8 inches wide, and 13 inches deep with its removable paper tray attached, the 6000 is an easy-to-carry thermal dye transfer printer with a docking port on top. Place the camera on top of the printer, press a button, and out come nice-looking 4-by-6-inch color prints. You can connect the printer to your PC via a USB port, or you can run slide shows by connecting it to your TV. A pack of paper and ink for 40 photos costs $25. Printing is fairly slow, compared with a common ink jet--the paper makes four passes through the printer before the photo is done. Kodak also offers a nonprinting camera dock for $80 that includes a rechargeable battery for the DX6340.
We have only minor complaints. As with nearly all digital cameras, you can use the LCD to frame shots. But it's turned off by default--you have to go into the menus and turn it on to use it, a seemingly unnecessary step, and one that may confuse novice camera users. (Fortunately, this step is not necessary for playback or when you switch to the Macro scene mode.) Once turned on, you can use the joystick to switch LCD viewing off and on. The exposure value control is buried in the menus; because it's the easiest way to compensate for exposure problems, many cameras put this important control on the navigation buttons.
Aperture-priority and shutter-priority exposure controls are the only advanced controls the DX6340 offers. They're easy to work. In our lab tests, the DX6340 produced images of average quality for a 3-megapixel camera. Its shots had accurate exposures and nicely reproduced colors, but some of the subtle shadings of red were lost in one of our test photos. Our prints looked well detailed, mostly, though our highly cropped test shot was not as sharp as prints from the Olympus C-740 Ultra Zoom and the Nikon Coolpix 3100 we tested at the same time. Along with a Secure Digital media slot, the DX6340 has 16MB of internal RAM, which ensures that the camera won't be useless if you forget to take along a memory card (which we've done on more occasions than we care to admit). Kodak does not include any SD media with unit, however. Designed primarily for snapshooters, the DX6340 has few of the advanced features that experienced photographers might look for, such as auto-bracketing, adjustable flash power, or panorama mode (or a multiple-shot exposure lock to go with it). The camera does have spot metering, however. This Kodak is relatively slow to boot up after it's been powered off--it takes about 7 seconds before you can take a shot. It can also be a bit slow locking its exposure and focus, but once that's set, the trigger is fairly fast. Kodak ships its EasyShare software with the DX6340. It's an easy-to-use application that has all of the common tools found in most digital imaging utilities: simple photo fixing, image organizing, and archiving, plus output options that include e-mail and online print ordering.
A well-designed, simple camera that has everything you need for point-and-shoot photography. Its docking capabilities are an especially nice option for family photos.