Kodak EasyShare C513 Digital Camera Makes It Easy to Take Bad Pictures

My beloved Kodak DC280 digital camera still takes great pictures, but it's also started to misbehave a bit. It failed to save almost two days worth of pictures during my trip to Seattle and Victoria in 2006 and then it did the same thing during my trip to Cooperstown in late 2007. Once was an anomaly. Twice was a recurring problem and prompted me to get a new camera.

I loved the quality of the pictures from my DC280 so much that I knew I wanted to get another Kodak camera. In addition, I wanted a camera that uses normal batteries instead of a built-in rechargeable battery. I've taken as many as 500 pictures a day while on vacation and I don't want the artificial limit of one charge or one set of batteries to limit what I can do with a camera. I chose my new camera, then discovered it was out of stock everywhere when I went to actually buy it.

I had a 10% off coupon valid while the camera was on sale at Target, so I got a raincheck there (with a notation that I should get an extra 10% off) and waited patiently for the new shipment of cameras. Unfortunately, it hadn't shown up yet when my raincheck was about to expire. I went and talked to the folks at Target and they couldn't extend my raincheck but offered to let me use the 10% off on another camera in stock that day. I couldn't really do research since I had to decide on the spot, so I chose the Kodak EasyShare C513 camera basically because of the Kodak name and its use of normal batteries. This camera was a few steps down from the one I'd originally selected and, unfortunately, it shows.

The camera is small and sleek and light and shiny, but it fails to take anything approaching good pictures. At 5.0 megapixels, its resolution is considerably better than my old camera (and I rarely used that camera on its highest resolution setting). However, despite the increased number of pixels, it somehow consistently fails to take pictures that are as sharp or as color rich as the pictures I used to get from my old camera.

To add insult to injury, a fairly high percentage of pictures from this camera are out of focus but look perfectly fine during the on-screen review. Thus, you never know whether a particular photograph has turned out until you get it onto a real computer and can look at it full size. This problem happens with all photos, but is particularly prevalent with indoor photographs. I find myself taking four or five pictures of everything that's important to me.

The camera supports up to 3x optical zoom but, unfortunately, any use of zoom almost guarantees that a picture will be fuzzy and out of focus or look blocky as if it only had a few hundred pixels in the shot rather than a few million. It doesn't help to have a useful feature like an optical zoom if every picture taken with it turns out badly.

I've also completely given up on taking pictures of signs or other types of text. With my old camera, I could take a picture of an informational sign or museum exhibit and actually wind up with a legible reproduction of it to read later 99% of the time (obviously I only did this when photographs were allowed by museums). I've not had a single one of these pictures turn out with the C513 camera and I've stopped trying to take them. That really bothers me.

The camera is also very poor at taking photographs while either you or your subject are moving, even moving slowly. During my first trip to Disney World, I took great photographs using my old camera on slow rides like the Kilimanjaro Safaris ride at Animal Kingdom or at shows like the Festival of the Lion King at the same park. I stopped taking photographs with this camera on my second trip to Disney World last December as they were all a blur even on the on-screen viewer.

The other problem I've had results from the very slow recovery rate of this camera. I could take an almost continuous stream of photographs with my old camera, but there is a noticeable multi-second delay with this camera. If you're in any sort of situation where you want to take repeated photographs of something, this delay will definitely frustrate you. This also contributed to my lack of pictures during my second Disney trip.

The Kodak EasyShare C513 camera is about 3.5 inches long, 2.5 inches tall, and 1 inch deep. It weights about 5 ounces and is so light I barely feel like I'm holding anything in my hand while I use it. It includes an auto-close shutter than snaps shut when the camera is off or not in active picture taking mode and has a built-in flash and a large LCD display on the back that's perhaps 2.5 inches wide and 2 inches tall. It definitely consumes the majority of the surface on the back of the camera. It includes a fairly long rope wrist strap, runs on two AA batteries, and has both internal memory and a standard SD slot.

I understand the small size of this camera placed some limitations on its design, but I really hate some of the decisions Kodak made in terms of control and component placement. The biggest irritation is the location of the SD slot. It's inside the battery door flush against the back of the camera. When inserted, the card is about an eighth of an inch lower than the tops of the nearby batteries and thus cannot be accessed while the batteries are inserted. I hate that you have to remove the batteries to change or remove the card.

Another problem is that several of the buttons are very small and need to be pressed with a significant amount of pressure. The on/off button located in the exact center of the top of the camera is miniscule; it's about a 16th of an inch in diameter and doesn't register light touches including those that are light because my large finger extends beyond the boundaries of the tiny button. The button that toggles the flash is right next to the power button and is the same size with the same problems. The okay button for the on screen display is in the center of a four way rocker and I almost always tilt the rocker in one direction or another when aiming for it. Most of the other buttons are a little bit larger or placed well enough that nothing interferes with their successful operation, but it really bothers me that three of the four most commonly used buttons are so difficult to control (the fourth being the "take photo" button which is large and easy to press).

The camera has a mini USB connector if you want to connect it directly to a computer and also has a tripod connector. I've never used either so I can't comment on them. I've always taken the SD card out to copy my photographs. If I had a mini USB cable or if this camera used a standard USB cable I'd be tempted to use it with this one, though, given how much of a pain it is to access the card slot.

The camera also has a video recorder that takes either VGA or QVGA quicktime movies. I've never tried to use it and can't comment on the quality or how much space the video files actually consume (according to Kodak you can get up to 80 minutes of video, but they don't specify the size of the card they used to calculate that number).

The camera has 16MB of internal memory plus supports large SD cards. I've used up to 1GB cards with no problems at all. A 1GB card holds about 2000 photographs at 5.0 megapixels. I could see exceeding that on a very long vacation filled with stuff I want to capture on film, but it definitely takes some effort to max out the card. Given how inexpensive SD cards are these days, it's easy to buy a few cards or one larger card to take along on a trip (Kodak has not specified if there's a maximum supported card size, so buyer beware with really large cards).

The EasyShare C513 also has the standard configuration options including auto flash control and redeye settings, zoom controls, the ability to review and delete photographs, cropping tools, and more. It also has a nifty info button that shows you exactly what camera settings were in place when you took a particular picture. It captures everything from the zoom level to the flash setting to the resolution to the file name to the date and time it was taken.

This camera gets decent battery life, but I don't feel like I've taken enough pictures to really delve into statistics about battery life. I'm not sure I ever will, as I find myself actively avoiding using this camera most of the time. I've run through two sets of batteries and I've taken maybe 150 pictures and used the review pictures feature fairly extensively. A portion of those photographs were taken indoors and used the flash which tends to eat battery life.

Before I bought my first digital camera, I used to travel with two or three film cameras and rotate them out to take multiple pictures when I wanted to ensure I got a viable picture of something. I feel forced to resort to that again with this camera. I shouldn't have to do that with a modern digital camera. I don't feel like this camera is reliable and it certainly doesn't provide accurate feedback about the state of the pictures it takes while they're still on the camera. This sense of uncertainty also takes me back to my chemical film days. I'd hoped I'd left that well in my past. Frankly, I'm at the point of chucking this camera (or saving it as a spare for emergency use) and getting yet another new camera. It didn't take me very long to get to this point and the only reason I haven't acted on it is that I've done almost no traveling this year and thus haven't really needed a camera much.

If you're looking for a new digital camera, don't look at the Kodak EasyShare C513 camera. It's inexpensive and has a nice feature set on paper, but the simple fact is that it doesn't take consistently good pictures. It has some other problems and issues, but they're almost irrelevant. It doesn't matter what features a camera has or what you think of the ergonomics of a camera if its pictures aren't acceptable and these aren't. Avoid this camera.