Kodak Slice review

If you’re looking for a keenly priced compact camera that takes attractive photos without any fuss, you’d better try elsewhere. With the Slice Kodak has managed to bring together all worst traits to afflict modern compact cameras in one disastrous package.

The 3.5in touchscreen is Kodak’s main selling point, but whereas the Sony TX7’s similar screen is a pleasure to use, on the Slice it’s a disaster. The 230,000-dot resolution looks blocky at this size, and slight interference is visible when reviewing shots. The touchscreen interface is a disaster, with sluggish, inaccurate responses to your inputs and a poor layout of controls. There’s lots of unnecessary menu scrolling, and icons obscure the top of the preview even though there’s blank space either side because of the screen’s wide aspect ratio.

There are a few welcome features, such as in-camera face tagging with face recognition. It’s also possible to pick photos to be uploaded to Facebook, Flickr and elsewhere, with uploads handled by the supplied software. However, we don’t like how images are kept in the 2GB internal memory after they’ve been wiped from the microSD card, as this has disastrous implications for privacy.

Performance was below average, taking over four seconds to switch on and shoot. Continuous mode ran at 0.4fps and lasted for just three shots. Normal shooting began with a reasonable 2.6 seconds between shots, but quickly slowed to around six seconds.

To top it all off, the Slice performed terribly in our image quality tests. Even at ISO 64, aggressive noise reduction removed any hint of subtle textures, making photos look like they’d been through a Photoshop-style paint effect. At ISO 400, photos resembled surrealist snowstorms. There were heavy chromatic aberrations towards the edges of the frame in wide-angle shots, and even at the centre of frames for telephoto shots. Companies as big as Kodak shouldn’t be making cameras this bad; it’s the worst example of style over substance we’ve seen for a long time.