Kodak's LS633 boasts a highly impressive OLED display along with a host of other features that should endear it to most consumers. What's more, it's available in Australia before anywhere else on the planet. Check out our Australian review.

It seems that if you want to talk really cutting edge technology, you either have to be interested in prototypes or simply live offshore. Mobile phones are an excellent point in case; there are more mobiles that have come and gone in Japan than we'll ever see on local shores, and what passes for cutting edge here would be worthless there. It's interesting to see, then, that Kodak has launched the LS633 camera to the Australian market first. Are we the subjects of some kind of peculiar market research, or just the lucky country?

The LS633 would be an impressive camera without its main selling point - a wide, 2.2inch OLED display that makes previewing and taking shots a breeze.

OLED?
Current digital cameras that come with a preview/shooting screen all use some form of LCD technology to display images. LCD is an extremely mature and well-understood technology, but it does suffer from some major drawbacks, especially on small portable devices. For a start, it's energy hungry, and to make matters worse the visible angles on some LCDs can be very poor, making camera LCDs almost obsolete once the sun goes down. OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) displays require no backlighting, dropping power consumption considerably. At the same time, prototypes so far displayed have had excellent viewing characteristics from a variety of angles and lighting situations. The one fly in the ointment so far has been a somewhat shorter shelf life of OLED devices, although we didn't have the LS633 for anywhere near long enough to assess this. In any case, Kodak offers its standard camera warranty with the LS633, so presumably they've got the screen life problem sorted.

The LS633 is set up in much the same way as any other USB-based camera; install the drivers and Kodak's EasyShare software, plug the camera in and you're ready to go. It ships with a rechargeable Lithium Ion battery which can be recharged either through the optional camera dock (AU$149) or with the supplied standalone recharger. The LS633 uses standard MMC type cards, and comes with 16MB of internal memory. Given that the LS633 can take shots at up to 2032x1524 resolution, you'll burn through that internal memory in no time at all; in our tests we averaged around 20 shots at best resolution.

Like the rest of the LS range, the LS633 has a combination thumb stick and selection wheel, along with a series of buttons that handle image deletion and picture reviewing. This leaves the selection wheel free for the various shooting modes. While many consumers will most likely leave the LS633 in Auto mode, there are also Sport (think movement), Night, Macro and Landscape modes, along with the obligatory short video clip shooting mode. The LS633 even has a very weak built-in speaker if you want to review your tiny and grainy movies. One nice touch with the selection wheel is that while each mode is presented in icon form on the wheel itself, moving between modes brings up an onscreen dialog that informs you what each mode is for - a great way to get beginners using the camera.

From a technical perspective, the LS633 is a 3.1 megapixel camera with a 10x zoom capability. It's only got 3x optical zoom capability, though; the rest is taken up with Kodak's 'advanced digital zoom'. The digital zoom did a reasonable job of interpolation, but given the additional stuttering that you're likely to introduce by zooming in that close, we'd recommend just taking an optically zoomed photo and blowing it up in your favourite image manipulation utility.

The main attraction for the LS633 is still the screen, however. In theory, an OLED screen should have a longer battery life than its LCD equivalent, although that's somewhat mitigated by the rather large screen that the LS633 bears. What it does bring to the table is a remarkably clear and crisp screen that gives a very good indication of how your finished photo will turn out. In previewing mode, images are initially loaded at a lower resolution to enable quick switching; wait a few seconds and they refresh to crisper images that are much easier on the eye. Kodak's also made good use of the screen real estate to display current system status, although you'll very quickly want to remove the sticker that obscures the top 5mm of the screen that just tells you how wide the screen is.

In our testing, the LS633 took some exceptionally good pictures, although like most fixed-focus cameras, it's all too easy to take blurry shots if you're not careful. The LS633 supports ISO 100-400 film modes, exposure compensation, four levels of white balancing, three types of exposure balancing and two different focus modes, multi-zone and center zone. If you are feeling the space pinch, quality can be adjusted to three different levels, represented by stars, although the lower levels do create some fairly ordinary pictures.

At AU$799 the LS633 is a particularly compelling buy; it's a good camera in its own right with an excellent display screen to boot, and comes highly recommended.

Kodak EasyShare LS633
Company: Kodak Australia
Price: AU$799
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 03 9353 2222

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