Kodak M5370 Review

Kodak EasyShare Touch M5370 Overview

Posted: 09/19/2011

The Kodak EasyShare Touch M5370 is aimed at fans of social media, seeking an affordable digital camera that lets them share their photos quickly and with a minimum of fuss. With a 3.0-inch touch-screen panel, the M5370 will also appeal to those who prefer a simple, no-fuss interface, and a minimum of physical controls. (The panel has a total resolution of ~76,000 pixels, with each pixel comprised of separate red, green and blue dots, for a total dot count of ~230,000.)

At the heart of the Kodak M5370 sits a high-resolution 1/2.3-inch type CCD image sensor with an effective resolution of 16.1 megapixels. As you might expect, given the sensor type and high pixel density, the M5370's maximum sensitivity is somewhat more limited than in many competing models, especially those with backside-illuminated CMOS imagers, and lower pixel counts. Still, the upper limit of ISO 1,600 equivalent is not uncommon at the entry level, and will likely suffice for many photographers. At the lower end of the range, the base sensitivity is ISO 64 equivalent.

The Kodak EasyShare M5370's sensor resides behind a Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon-branded 5x optical zoom lens. Maximum aperture falls from a rather dim f/3.9 at the M5370's 28mm-equivalent wide angle, to f/5.7 at the 140mm-equivalent telephoto. (Information on actual focal length range wasn't available at press time.) As is common at its pricepoint, the M5370 lacks any form of mechanical image stabilization.

Like many of the company's past models, the M5370 looks to stand out from its competitors by easing the burden of sharing your creations. A dedicated Share button on the camera body can be used to tag images and movies for sharing by email or on Kodak Gallery, as well as on popular social media sites such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Orkut, Yandex, and Kaixin001. (The last two services, if they don't seem familiar, are among the most popular social sites in Russia and China, respectively.) The Share button can also be used to despatch images and videos to Kodak Pulse picture frames. Tagged images are uploaded automatically when the camera is next attached to your computer, which must be running the Kodak Share Button App software.

That, in itself, isn't new. Another feature related to sharing is rather more unusual, however. The Kodak M5370 includes not just face detection, but also face recognition, allowing it to locate and identify the faces of up to twenty individuals. Whenever those faces are recognized in a scene, the image is tagged with the names, up to a maximum of five faces in any given image. The clever bit comes at upload time: when sharing the images on Facebook, the bundled software can automatically tag each image to identify which of your friends or colleagues they contain. For those who shoot and share a lot of people images on Facebook, this could prove a significant timesaver.

Of course, if you're planning to share your images immediately upon upload, you'll want to fulfil your creative intent in the camera, and Kodak caters to this with the M5370, as well. A variety of post-capture effects and retouching tools include cropping, rotation, spot color, background blur, tints, borders, captions, and a photo booth mode which combines multiple subsequent frames into a single "photo strip". The M5370 can also extract still frames from its 720p high-def video. Videos are recorded using H.264 compression with AAC audio in an MP4 container, and have a capture rate of 30 frames per second.

Other features of the Kodak M5370 include a not-very-generous 18MB of built-in memory, MicroSD / MicroSDHC storage, USB 2.0 High Speed and NTSC / PAL standard-def video output connections, and power from a KLIC-7006 lithium ion battery pack.

The Kodak EasyShare Touch M5370 ships from Fall 2011, priced at around US$180. Available body colors include silver, blue, pink, or red.