In Brief

The Kodak EasyShare-one invents an entirely new product category -- the network-connected camera. Now that more pictures are sent via email than printed on paper, it's clear that Kodak is onto something. As a first-of-breed product (with a price-tag to match), the EasyShare-one will appeal primarily to early adopters and wireless mavens, but the camera is also easy and functional enough to work well for a broad range of regular people too. We can see armies of real estate and insurance agents uploading pictures to the Web and emailing photos to clients as they make their rounds, no computer required. And family vacations will never be the same when you can send picture postcards to Grandma that arrive the day they are taken, rather than a week later.

But sharing photos wirelessly is only half the fun. The large LCD screen and video out feature also make the EasyShare-one an ideal traveling photo player. You can store up to 1500 favorite photos on the built-in 256MB memory, in addition to whatever size SD memory card you buy. Pressing one button in any album instantly starts a slideshow for viewing on the LCD or a TV. The camera also shoots and plays full 640x480 MPEG-4 video.

While the EasyShare-one has a few interface annoyances, for the most part, the LCD menus, buttons, and features are first-rate, with a lot of care obviously going into the design. A minimum of buttons let you perform most picture-taking and organization operations, with the touchscreen stylus only needed for less-frequent tasks, such as connecting to Wi-Fi networks, changing preferences, and typing email addresses or picture captions using the on-screen keyboard.

The camera's strengths are obviously the wireless and playback features, but it's no slouch in the picture-taking department. As a fully automatic, point-and-shoot digicam, it performs similarly to the best cameras in its class. At a street price of $499, the EasyShare-one costs about $250 more than most good 4MP cams. But they lack the EasyShare's Wi-Fi and organization features, and come with much less built-in memory and much smaller LCDs that are not designed for album playback. And Kodak also throws in a free extra battery and leather case. You do the math.

In Depth

It took a while before we could take the first pic with our new EasyShare-one, since we had to charge the batteries, install software, sign up for the Kodak EasyShare Gallery online photo account, and set up the Wi-Fi card (see the Setup page for the full story). But it was worth the wait. Once we started snapping, we quickly got used to the LCD menu interface and control buttons, and explored the features without having to resort to the manual. A handy Info button on the side of the camera brings up context-sensitive help, but the features are pretty clear even without it. The 230,000-pixel 3-inch LCD screen allows lots more menu detail than you typically get with digicams. For example, the generous 16 scene modes (from landscape to sport and close-up) are clearly explained with example pictures and full-sentence descriptions, rather than the usual cryptic icons. If you need more help, there's a 111-page printed manual, plus a full PDF version of it that includes video demo clips. There's also a tutorial DVD.

The camera has a touchscreen and stylus in addition to a few well-chosen buttons. You can perform most tasks with the five-way navigator, and fingers also work for many touchscreen choices. Typing on the onscreen keyboard to enter email messages will require the stylus, however, and you will likely keep them short. The Photo Gallery page has a full run-down on all the camera's buttons and controls.

While the camera has fully automatic shutter speed and aperture, the scene, ISO, white balance, and exposure compensation settings can be manually adjusted. Indoor flash shots will benefit from setting the ISO to 400 (the auto limit is 160), and the scene modes are very handy, but we didn't bother with the other settings. Picture quality was very good, if slightly over-saturated and sharpened, as with most consumer digicams. The zoom lens produced some curvature in photos of tall buildings, again typical of consumer cameras. Serious photographers are not likely to be looking at point-and-shoot cameras in this class.

We added a 256MB SD card to the 256MB of internal memory, which together allowed storage of almost 400 pictures at full resolution. If you will be keeping a lot of pictures in the camera for playback purposes, we recommend copying over lower-quality versions for this purpose. Even TV screens only show about 640x480 worth of data.

Once you've accumulated some pictures in the camera, the fun really begins. You can crop photos, add captions, organize them into albums, upload them to the Kodak EasyShare Gallery Web site, create one-click slideshows, make prints, and email photos to friends and family, ALL without connecting to a computer. The slideshow feature adds random transitions between pictures, and has a user-selectable display speed. The organization software parallels the album structure of the EasyShare software and Web site, so you can keep things synchronized, and uploading, emailing and printing can all be done wirelessly via the included Wi-Fi card.

The Setup page has details on Wi-Fi setup and operation, which was easier than with many PDAs. We wish the connection didn't drop after just four minutes of inactivity, but we quickly got used to only connecting at the point we had our emails prepared and were ready to send. The battery savings are worth it in a camera with a big LCD screen that draws a lot of power. Battery life was okay, good for about 160 shots or 2 hours of operation, but the included spare is definitely needed for all-day vacation outings. One glitch is that the battery life indicator showed it half-full when it popped up a message saying that the camera would shut down due to low battery. A more accurate indicator is needed.

Our most-used wireless feature was definitely email. Being able to zip off shots with a few clicks is just plain cool. You can get connected via Wi-Fi at any home or office network, even if secured (WEP is supported now, WPA is coming in November). You can also hop online at any T-Mobile HotSpot -- that's more than 6,000 locations in the U.S. alone, including most Starbucks and Borders. If you already have a T-Mobile account for your laptop, you can use that for your camera (although not simultaneously). If not, you can sign up for a special $4.99 per month camera account. Considering T-Mobile's pay-as-you-go plan is $6 per hour, the camera-only price seems like a good deal.

When you send an email, the recipient gets a message with thumbnails of the photos you shared, and links to view them online and order prints. We wish that you could also download pictures from the Gallery for home printing or use in CDs and DVDs, but that is how the EasyShare Gallery and most commercial photo sites work. If your recipients want the actual photo files you will have to send them from your computer later. Another thing you can't do is order online prints directly from the camera, a feature we'd love to see in a software update.

While we don't expect Kodak to put out software and firmware updates with the frequency of Apple or Microsoft, the fact is that the EasyShare-one is very much a software-driven device, with all its organization, playback, and sharing features. The hardware is almost incidental, although it is very good. We can't wait to see how the EasyShare-one evolves, whether through software changes or entirely new models, but we know it will happen. The connected camera is here to stay.