Camera Testing

12 May 2023

Ive spent the last month in a boat with my best friend fishing. Every now and then, you need to get out and just catch a fish and then let'em go. It's good for the soul. In between fishing, and installing new electronics on my friend's boat, editing video from the fishing trips and putting them up on YouTube, and building a fishing rod holder/tackel box/battery charger stand in my garage; I still managed to test a couple of interesting cameras. The Kodak Easyshare P712 and the Nikon Coolpix L8 The Kodak cameras as a whole run from great to "What were they thinking??" The P712 is 7-mega pixel camera. It does have a 12-x zoom and them you can electronically zoom in more, but I wouldn't recommend it. The pictures do start to look grain fill and there are more effects apparent in the Jpeg images. It did some strange things while I was using it, Shooting outdoors it kept using the built in flash. There's no way that little light could add any light to my backyard at noon but still the little flash was popping with every picture I took. It could be that I may have missed a setting or the camera could be broken. However the images that came out were not bad, they got even better after going through Light Room and Photoshop. I've never gotten bad results with any Nikon I have used.From the little tiny pocket cameras to my DSLRs. However, some of them didn't thrill me to use. The L840 was a surprise, just point and shoot the camera has only auto and 32x zoom... every picture I took except for those I goofed came out sharp and clear. This camera gifted to me by a friend so it was in excellent condition and worked beautifully. Being that I own and use Nikon's the menu systems are all related and easier to understand than some of the other cameras. I shot the cameras side by side on my camera test rig so the view would be somewhat identical.

After testing the Kodak P712 I discovered that this camera saves it's images as Jpeg, Tiffs and Raw files. So I had to take the camera back out and shoot it in Raw. Raw is a format that has requires additional processing after the picture has been taken. Raw images are more like digital negatives. Unlike; Jpegs which are processed in the camera and are considered finished when the images are downloaded from the camera. Raw files have to go through a program like Photoshop or Lightroom to adjust the many variables to get the images to look the way you want them too.