Zoom
A typical 3x optical zoom range, with average performance.

34mm	102mm	5x Digital Zoom

The Kodak C360 zooms over the equivalent of a 34-102mm range, fairly typical for its class. At full wide angle, details are fairly soft, with noticeable blurring in the corners and a fair bit of coma distortion. Results are better at full telephoto. The 5x digital zoom takes you to 15x total, albeit with the loss of quality that digital zoom creates.

Macro
A small macro area with good detail and high resolution. Flash has trouble up close though.

Standard Macro	Macro with Flash

The Kodak C360's macro setting performs well, capturing a small minimum area of just 2.07 x 1.55 inches (52 x 39 millimeters). Detail and resolution are both good, though the lens produces strong blurring in the corners of the frame. (Most cameras have some softening in the corners in macro mode, the amount of blurring here is a bit greater than average.) The flash has a lot of trouble throttling down for the macro area, and strongly overexposes the shot. (Plan on using external lighting for your closest macro shots with the C360.)

Distortion
Slightly higher than average barrel distortion at wide angle, but virtually no distortion at telephoto.

This is the tendency for the lens to bend straight lines outward (like a barrel--usually at wide angle) or inward (like a pincushion--usually at telephoto). The Kodak EasyShare C360's 0.9% barrel distortion at wide angle is just a little higher than average among the cameras I've tested, although I personally feel that this level is too high. At the telephoto end, the C360 actually shows about one pixel of barrel distortion, or 0.04%.

Barrel distortion at 34mm is 0.9%

Very slight barrel at 102mm is 0.04% (one pixel)

Chromatic aberration
Rather high chromatic aberration at wide angle, very little at telephoto.

Wide: Rather high (Top left @ 200%)	Wide: Rather high (Top right @ 200%)
Tele: Very little (Top left @200%)	Tele: Almost none (Top right @200%)

Chromatic aberration is rather high at wide angle, showing almost 10 pixels of very bright coloration on either side of the target lines. At telephoto, this distortion is much lower. (This distortion is visible as a very slight colored fringe around the objects at the edges of the field of view on the resolution target.)

Corner Sharpness
Significant softening in the lower corners of the frame, less in the top corners. Blurring doesn't extend too far into the frame though.

Quite soft in the lower corners.	Better results in the top corners.

The Kodak C360 produced soft corners in a few shots, the lower corners seeming to have the most visible effect. Fortunately though, the softness didn't extend too far into the frame.

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting
Slight color casts with both Auto and Incandescent white balance settings, but better than average performance overall. Less exposure compensation required than usual.

Auto White Balance +0.7 EV	Incandescent White Balance +0.3 EV

Color balance indoors under incandescent lighting was just slightly warm in the Incandescent white balance mode, while the Auto setting resulted in a stronger pink cast. Both results were a fair bit better than average though. The Kodak C360 only required a +0.3 EV exposure boost to get a good exposure in the Incandescent mode (Auto needed +0.7 EV), much less than average for this shot. The color is just slightly dark here, making the blue flowers quite dark and slightly purplish. (A common outcome for this shot, given the very warm cast of the lighting used.) Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulb, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the US. Overall, a better than average handling of this very tough light source.

Outdoors, daylight
Good color balance, very bright colors. Better than average exposure accuracy.

Auto White Balance, +0.7 EV	Auto White Balance, Auto Exposure

Outdoor shots were generally contrasty with blown out highlights if there were any bright subjects in direct sun. Shadow detail was also a little limited, but nothing that would raise an alarm for a consumer digicam. Exposure accuracy overall was quite good, the camera typically requiring less exposure compensation than we're accustomed to seeing with consumer digicams.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Resolution
High resolution, 1,100 lines of strong detail.

Our laboratory resolution chart revealed sharp, distinct line patterns down to about 1,100 lines per picture height, with extinction at around 1,600 lines. This is average or just slightly below average for a five-megapixel camera, capturing more than enough detail for 11x14 inch prints. (The camera did produce slight color artifacts at lower line frequencies though, visible in the full-sized res target shots.) Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail. Beware that while you might be able to make out what looks like distinct lines at numbers higher than those we've mentioned here, the camera is just doing its best to continue interpreting the lines. If you zoom in and follow them from the wider portions, you'll see the lines converge and reappear several times, so the lines you see at 1,500 and higher are really only artifacts generated by the camera's imaging system.

Strong detail to 1,100 lines horizontal	Strong detail to 1,100 lines vertical

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Fairly sharp images, with some loss of detail from noise suppression.

Pretty good definition of high-contrast elements, though somewhat soft in the finer areas.	Subtle detail: Hair Noise suppression blurs detail in areas of subtle contrast, as in the darker parts of Marti's hair here.

The Kodak C360's images are reasonably sharp, without obvious over-sharpening on the camera's part. (Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing colors and tones right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.)

Noise-suppression systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the individual strands are lost and an almost "watercolor" look appears. The crop at far right shows this, with lower-contrast areas of Marti's hair showing only limited detail, even though individual strands are quite visible against her cheek in the uncropped image. (Do note though, that the level of detail loss shown here isn't all that obvious on prints smaller than 8x10 inches though.)

ISO & Noise Performance
Moderate to moderately-high noise at the normal sensitivity settings, very high noise that blurs detail at the higher settings.

ISO 80	ISO 100	ISO 200
ISO 400	ISO 800

The Kodak C360's lower ISO settings did produce a little image noise, but it isn't too evident in prints. As the ISO setting increases though, so does the noise level as well as the loss of detail, and its images at ISO 400 are quite soft indeed. At ISO 800, noise is very high, with stronger blurring and brighter pixels. ISO 800 is available only at 1.8 megapixel resolution, because the camera combines several sensor pixels for every output pixel reduce noise levels. ISO 400 images are marginal but usable for 5x7 inch prints, ISO 800 ones are marginal even for 4x6 inch prints.

Extremes: Sunlit and low light tests
High resolution with good overall detail, though high contrast and limited shadow detail. Pretty good low-light performance, capable of capturing bright images under average city street lighting and slightly darker conditions.

+0.3 EV	+0.7 EV	+1.3 EV

Sunlight:
Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here.)

The Kodak C360 had some trouble with the deliberately harsh lighting in the test above, producing very high contrast with blown highlights and deep shadows. Noise suppression is visible in the shadows, contributing to a loss of detail there. Though the exposure at +0.3 EV does preserve more highlight detail, overall exposure and Marti's skin tones look better with the +0.7 EV adjustment. (In "real life" though, be sure to use fill flash in situations like the one shown above. If possible, it's much better to shoot in the shade.)

	1 fc 11 lux	1/2 fc 5.5 lux	1/4 fc 2.7 lux	1/8 fc 1.3 lux	1/16 fc 0.67 lux
ISO 80	2 sec f2.7	4 sec f2.7	8 sec f2.7	8 sec f2.7	8 sec f2.7

Low light:
Our low light testing showed that the Kodak EasyShare C360's capabilities in this area will be more than adequate for most consumers, provided they know to switch to the camera's Long Exposure mode for after-dark photography. (Long Exposure mode forces the ISO setting to 80 for minimum image noise, but permits shutter times as long as eight seconds.) The net result in Long Exposure mode was that our test images were bright as low as 1/4 foot-candle, which is about 1/4 as bright as average city street lighting at night. Color balance was slightly warm from the Auto white balance setting, but well within acceptable limits. The camera's autofocus system also worked down to the 1/4 foot-candle light level. Do keep in mind though, that the very long shutter times associated with Long Exposure mode absolutely demand the use of a tripod or other camera support to get sharp photos. (A useful trick is to just prop the camera on a convenient surface, and use its self-timer to release the shutter. This avoids any jiggling from your finger pressing the shutter button, and can work quite well when you don't have a tripod handy.)

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Slightly oversaturated color (especially reds and blues), very typical of consumer digital cameras. Generally good hue accuracy.

In the diagram above, the squares show the original color, and the circles show the color that the camera captured. More saturated colors are located towards the periphery of the graph. Hue changes as you travel around the center. Thus, hue-accurate, highly saturated colors appear as lines radiating from the center.

Most consumer digital cameras produce color that's more highly saturated (more intense) than found in the original subjects. This is simply because most people like their color a bit brighter than life. The Kodak C360 follows this trend, but doesn't oversaturate most colors as much as many consumer cameras do. Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it's very easy for these "memory colors" to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc. The C360 did render skin tones slightly on the pink side in most cases, but most consumers should find the C360's bright color very appealing overall.

The other important part of color rendition is hue accuracy. Hue is "what color" the color is. Here, the Kodak C360 did unusually well. The only significant hue shift was to move cyans a bit closer to blue, a common and desirable tweak, making for better-looking sky colors.

See full set of test images with explanations See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Coverage
Optical viewfinder is a bit tight, though the LCD monitor is quite accurate.

34mm eq., optical viewfinder	102mm eq., optical viewfinder
34mm eq., LCD monitor	102mm eq., LCD monitor

The C360's optical viewfinder was a little tight, showing only about 85% frame accuracy at wide angle and about 84% at telephoto. However, the LCD monitor showed 99% frame accuracy at both zoom settings, excellent by any measure.

Coverage and Range
The C360's small flash has a limited range and produces a slight blue cast in combination with typical incandescent room lighting. Our standard shots required much more exposure compensation than average.

34mm equivalent	102mm equivalent
Normal Flash +1.7 EV

Flash coverage was rather uneven at wide angle but very good at telephoto. In the Indoor test, the flash on the C360 underexposed our subject at its default setting, requiring a whopping +1.7 EV exposure compensation adjustment to get reasonably bright results. Even here, the exposure is just slightly dim, with a slight pink cast. (In flash mode, the exposure compensation adjustment seems to affect exposure from the background illumination, but not the flash itself.

8 ft	9 ft	10 ft	11 ft	12 ft	13 ft	14 ft
1/90 sec f4.6 ISO 80	1/90 sec f4.6 ISO 80	1/90 sec f4.6 ISO 80	1/90 sec f4.6 ISO 80	1/90 sec f4.6 ISO 80	1/90 sec f4.6 ISO 80	1/90 sec f4.6 ISO 80

Even at eight feet, our closest test range, flash power was slightly weak. Kodak states the C360's flash range as a maximum of 11.8 feet, though I noticed reduced brightness from nine feet on.

Print Quality
Good print quality, great color, usable 11x14 inch prints. ISO 400 images are soft but usable at 5x7, ISO 800 shots are marginal even at 4x6.

Testing hundreds of digital cameras, we've found that you can only tell just so much about a camera's image quality by viewing its images on-screen. Ultimately, there's no substitute for printing a lot of images and examining them closely. For this reason, we now routinely print sample images from the cameras we test on our Canon i9900 studio printer, and on the Canon iP5000 here in the office. (See the Canon i9900 review for details on that model.)

With the Kodak EasyShare C360, we found that it had enough resolution to make good 8x10 inch prints. At 11x14, its prints were a bit softer looking, but probably adequate for wall or table display. At high ISO, image noise levels increase even while the images become softer from the anti-noise processing. ISO 200 photos look OK printed at 8x10 inches, but ISO 400 ones are marginal even at 5x7 inches (but look fine at 4x6). ISO 800 shots were marginal even at 4x6 inches, but it could be argued that a soft photo is better than one that's just too blurry from a slow shutter speed to see the subject clearly. Color-wise, the Kodak C360's images looked really great when printed on the i9900, with vibrant, accurate color. Most consumers will probably find the C360's colorful images very appealing.

Kodak C360 Timing
Good shutter response, somewhat slow shot to shot speeds.

Startup/Shutdown:
Power On to first shot	4.1 seconds
Shutter response (Lag Time):
Full Autofocus Wide	0.53 second
Full Autofocus Tele	0.80 second
Prefocused	0.112 second
Cycle time (shot to shot)
Normal large/fine JPEG	2.34 seconds
Flash recycling	4.5 seconds
Continuous mode	0.5 second 2.0 frames/second (5 large/fine frames)
Download speed
Windows Computer, USB 2.0	769 KBytes/sec

The C360's performance ranges from quite fast to just average, depending on what you're trying to do. Start-up is a bit slow at 4.1 seconds, and the cycle times are lagging at 2.34 second for the highest image quality setting. Autofocus is faster than average at 0.53 second at wide angle, slowing to 0.80 second at telephoto. (Still slightly better than average.) If you "prefocus" the camera by half-pressing and holding down the shutter button before the final exposure though, it's much faster, with a shutter delay of only 0.112 second. Continuous-mode speed is decent, at two frames/second, for up to five shots in succession. The flash takes about 4.5 seconds to recharge after a full-power shot, about average for this class of camera. Connected to a computer, download speeds are fast enough that you probably won't feel a need for a separate card reader, but nonetheless aren't as fast as some cameras currently on the market. Bottom line, while not a first choice for sports or other fast-paced action, the C360 is responsive enough (particular at wide angle lens settings) to handle most family photo opportunities.

See full Picky Details page.

Battery
Moderate battery life with the LCD on, exceptional when LCD is switched off.

Operating Mode	Battery Life
Still-image capture mode LCD on	96 minutes
Still-image capture mode no LCD	18.6 hours
Image playback	228 minutes

The Kodak EasyShare C360 uses a pair of AA cells for its power. The table above shows maximum run times based on our power measurements and a set of "standard" 1600 mAh NiMH rechargeable batteries. -- Times with modern high-capacity NiMH cells with capacities of 2100 mAh or higher could be proportionately longer, but I did find that the C360 was a little finicky about what NiMH cells it liked. (Stick with Kodak or another top brand for best results.) As always, I highly recommend purchasing a couple of sets of high-capacity NiMH batteries and a good-quality charger right along with the camera. Read my NiMH battery shootout page to see which batteries currently on the market are the best, and see my review of the Maha C-204W NiMH battery charger, my current favorite.

Storage
No card is included with the Kodak EasyShare C360, although it accepts SD/MMC cards; 32MB RAM is built into the camera.

Image Capacity with 32MB Internal Memory		Fine
2,567 x 1,932	Images	17
	File Size	1.6MB
2,304 x 1,728	Images	21
	File Size	1.3MB
2,048 x 1,536	Images	27
	File Size	1.1MB
1,552 x 1,164	Images	43
	File Size	659K

I strongly recommend buying at least a 128MB memory card, to give yourself extra space for extended outings.

See full Picky Details page.