The Kodak Easyshare Z710, a 7MP noughties digicam
It’s been a while since I picked up a ‘generic’ camera from the CEX website, but last week they were advertising a ‘generic 7MP camera’ for 4€. I like these as you are never quite sure what you are going to get and for a few Euros the outlay is minimal. This time it turned out to be a Kodak Easyshare Z710 digicam from 2006.
The Kodak Easyshare Z710 is a general point and shoot camera with a 7.1MP CCD sensor and a 38-380mm zoom lens. This 10x zoom was one of its selling points at the time, alongside the Easyshare brand, which meant you could share images straight to a computer with either the USB connection or an optional docking station. The camera has 32MB of internal memory, enough for about 10 images, and although there is a slot for an SD cards use was described as ‘optional’. Fortunately the camera will read my 2GB SD cards so downloading images is not a problem.
As usual,with all new cameras I took the Z710 across the road to test it with my favourite tree and well. The colour images were competent enough, nothing special, but let’s face it, this is a basic point and shoot camera. Then I brought out the colour filters to make a trichrome and the 720nm infrared filter to see what the infrared response was like.
I took one colour photograph with the infrared filter and then set the camera to black and white so that I could make some trichromes. It was a bit fiddly to find tge right options in the menu, but I took photographs with red, green, blue and the 720nm Infrared filter. Back home I loaded the images into GuIMP and using the infrared, red, and green filtered images (for red, green and blue layers, respectively) made a digital aerodrome.
I also took the colour infrared image and channel swapped the red and blue channels. Often this can be ‘hit-or-miss’ but this time the channel-swapped photograph came out really well. Mind you, the infrared photographs were full of noise.
On the whole I was really happy with how this camera performed, especially on the tree, where the afternoon autumn sun was behind me. With the shed in the field the sun was to one side, so the light was not ideal, but the aerochrome and channel swapped infrared image came out well. I don’t think this is a special camera, by any stretch, but for €, what’s not to like?
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