Kodak EasyShare M1093 IS

Favourable features floored by fiddle factor

Fri 22 May 2009 // 08:02 UTC

All this is a shame, because, the EasyShare M1093 IS gave a pretty good performance. Picture quality was sharp and colours were well saturated. Noise levels were pretty low, even around ISO 800. The Panorama feature was one of the best we’ve used and produced some nice results.

Panorama mode is among the best we've encountered

The 3x zoom is a bit of a disappointment and makes the image stabilisation system a bit redundant. We tried zooming with it on and off and didn’t see any difference in the results. In smart capture mode, the camera only seemed to switch between macro and landscape modes, but coped fine with most kinds of shots. The wide angle setting is a bit of a letdown though. Video looked smooth, although we didn’t get a chance to view it on an HD Ready set, as we didn’t have an HDTV adapter.

The battery is powered from within the camera body, and you can use a special USB cable to charge the EasyShare M1093 IS from a PC but, again, this is optional. The battery power turned out to be another issue as it ran out of juice around the 150 frames mark. We think anyone buying a camera at this price would be happy with the pictures. It’s just a shame Kodak has made something of a dog’s dinner with the handling.

Verdict

The EasyShare M1093 IS is a budget camera with one or two surprising features, including HD movie recording. It’s smart, compact and produces pretty good pictures. However, Kodak has missed a trick when it comes to handling, and it seems that style rather than functionality was the main focus. ®