Kodak EasyShare DX6440
Digital Camera Review

ABOVE: A photographer's view of the Kodak DX6440 with its easy-to-use mode dial and 1.8-inch display panel.

An affordable, user-friendly system for snapshooting, printing, and sharing

Kodak is to photography what Coca-Cola is to soft drinks. Like its carbonated counterpart, it's an international brand that dates back to the 19th Century, when George Eastman invented dry photographic film and the rollfilm camera. Eastman's slogan was "You press the button, we do the rest," and Kodak has helped consumers preserve family and travel memories ever since.

Still, Kodak isn't just the company that invented the Brownie, the Instamatic, and other mass-market consumer cameras. It also has a long tradition of manufacturing 35mm cameras for serious photographers, such as the German-made Retina rangefinder and SLRs of the 1950s, which my father used to record our family's trips around the world on Kodachrome slides. And in more recent years, Kodak has made the highest-resolution professional digital camera products in the business, with resolutions of up to 14 Megapixels (or about triple what you'd get with a high-end consumer camera).

Recently, Kodak has introduced a series of EasyShare DX cameras for the home photographer that seek to combine ease of use and technical innovation with mass-market pricing. One such model is the Kodak EasyShare DX6440, which offers an impressive 4 Megapixels of resolution plus a 4X zoom lens at a U.S. street price in the $375-400 range. The DX6440 is part of a comprehensive "EasyShare" system that lets novice or convenience-minded photographers transfer pictures, recharge the camera, and order or make prints with a minimum of fuss or technical expertise. I tested the camera on an Oceania Cruises voyage from Dover to Barcelona, and this article describes what I learned, liked, and disliked during my two weeks with the DX6440.

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