Kodak EasyShare V570 review

Normal compact cameras are no good at taking landscape pictures - their lenses aren't wide-angle, so only a small part of the scene ends up in the photo.

An SLR with a separate wide-angle lens fixes the problem, but costs hundreds of pounds and isn't that easy to use. That's where the Kodak EasyShare V570 comes in - it's the world's first compact digital camera with two lenses, a normal zoom lens and a wide-angle lens.

At the zoom lens' widest 39mm setting, you can get a good amount of the scene in front of you into the frame and the 5x optical zoom is impressive. The wide-angle lens, however, lets you get much more of the image in without having to step backwards.

The quality of the wide-angle lens is fine; there's no noticeable barrel distortion and switching between it and the zoom is at the touch of a button. Annoyingly though, when you change from the zoom to the wide-angle lens, or vice versa, the scene in your viewfinder 'jumps' to a different view - so you have to completely recompose the shot. The zoom function does a similar thing - instead of zooming smoothly in and out, it jumps back and forth between one of six predefined spots on the lens.

Nor is it much use having a wide-angle lens if other aspects of picture quality have been neglected, and even in bright daylight, our shots didn't compare well with those of other digital compact cameras. Zoom in close and you can see smudged detail, digital noise and purple fringing around areas of high contrast. Images shot at the camera's most sensitive setting (ISO 800) are limited to 1.8 megapixels and are particularly noisy, which is bad news if you want to do a lot of low light photography.

The camera is built well enough, but feels oddly weighted in the hand and it's remarkably easy to spoil wide-angle shots with your index finger creeping over the lens. The function buttons are tricky to identify in low light too, though the huge, detailed colour screen helps with navigation.

The supplied EasyShare software offers good basic cataloguing and image-editing functions, and you can flag up pictures on the camera for emailing or printing later. This process is made even easier with the smart dock, which charges the camera and allows it to connect to your PC or to a television for slideshows.

This isn't a bad camera, but image quality is comparatively poor, and other niggles like the weak flash and four shot limit in burst mode mean that it's not a must-have.