Kodak Easyshare C743

The low-cost ($200 as of 10/6/06) C743 strikes a good balance between affordability and performance, delivering high image quality and ease of use.

At this low price, though, you have to accept a few imperfections. The camera body feels chintzy, the printed user manual is basic and lacks a table of contents and an index, and features are minimal. You won't find things that are available on some pricier point-and-shoot cameras, such as image stabilization, manual controls, and a panorama mode. The C743 also lacks both aperture- and shutter-priority modes.

If you're okay with these missing elements, you'll appreciate what the C743 has to offer. It produces good-looking photos, and earned an overall image-quality rating of Very Good in our tests. The exposure and contrast of our still life shot and our mannequin shot looked nicely balanced. Colors were vibrant and our subjects' skin tones were fairly accurate. However, the C743 fell short in our distortion and sharpness tests: Our test image appeared blurry and contained a lot of color artifacts.

In our battery test, the camera lasted for 284 shots, which is about average and not bad considering that the camera runs on two disposable lithium ion AA batteries. To conserve battery power, you can frame shots using the camera's optical viewfinder instead of the power-hungry LCD. Though many users rely heavily on the LCD these days, using the viewfinder can be a lifesaver when the camera is running low on juice and you have no extra batteries to swap in.

Like most Kodak point-and-shoots, the C743 is very easy to use. The help menus and clearly labeled buttons make it easy for beginners to learn to use the camera. You get 13 scene modes (about average for this class of camera), including Children, Sport, and Backlight. If you accidentally erase a photo while reviewing your album, you can undo the deletion--but only immediately after you've deleted the image. Once you exit the playback mode, you can't recover the picture. This simple-to-use camera is a solid choice for casual photographers on a tight budget.

Grace Aquino