Kodak DX6490 Review

The autofocus range is 24 inches to infinity in wide angle and from 6.6 ft. to infinity in telephoto. The macro close-up mode covers from 4.7 to 27.6 inches in wideangle and from 3.9 to 6.9 feet in telephoto. The auto focus is high speed and low light capable with selectable multi-zone or center-zone modes. For scenics or open-sky pictures you may need to use the landscape (infinity) focus mode.

The built-in flash has modes for auto, fill, red-eye and forced off. The working flash range in wide is 0.6 - 4.9m (2 - 16 ft.) at ISO 140 and in telephoto from 1.0 - 4.2m (3.3 - 13.8 ft.) at ISO 200. The flash is manually "popped up" with a button on the top.

A standard external PC flash sync connector is available. The external flash will be signalled to fire each time the camera takes a picture, regardless of the camera flash settings. Accepts all standard external flashes, maximum 500V trigger voltage.

The eyelevel finder is really an electronic viewfinder (EVF) which is a small but very high resolution color LCD with a magnified eyepiece. It has dioptric adjustment and can display anything on that can be displayed on the color LCD - just press the EVF/LCD button to swap the displays.

The EVF automatically turns off 15 seconds after you take the camera away from your face. To turn it back on just put it up to your eye and look through the viewfinder. To turn it on after a minute has elapsed, press any button. Both the EVF and LCD will go monochrome and "gain up" so as to be useable in very dim light conditions.

The controls are fairly simple and effective. Upper right corener is the zoom lens control. The "i" button controls the amount of information that is overlayed on the EVF/LCD image. The Share button lets you select images for printing, e-mailing, or to mark as a favorite. There's a dedicated Delete button to erase images during review. The Review button puts the camera into playback mode. The Menu button calls up and dismisses the menus.

Navigating the menus is simple, just use the 4-way joystick in the center of the Mode Dial to move up and down through the selections and accept a setting by pressing it inward. The record and play menus are detailed on the next two pages of this review.

The illuminated Mode Dial has positions for: Movie, Off, Auto, P/ASM (Program AE, Aperture priority, Shutter speed priority and Manual exposure modes with a full range of other settable features), Sport, Portrait, Night scene modes.

On the top is the shutter release, popup flash release, Drive mode button to select selftimer, single or burst mode, the Focus mode selects macro, landscape (infinity) or normal, the Flash mode button cycles through the Auto, Red-Eye, Fill and Off modes. And the speaker for camera sounds and movie playback.

The Jog Dial located on the front of the handgrip is used to change settings like PASM exposure mode, exposure compensation, shutter speed, aperture and etc. It is pushed in as well as rotated.

I/O ports are on the side: Standard flash PC connector on the top. On the bottom is an Audio-Video Out with user-selectable NTSC or PAL format. The USB port works with the Kodak EasyShare Sofware to make image downloading fast and easy even without the use of the optional Easy Share Dock. And a 5V DC IN jack for an optional AC power adapter.

The DX6490 Zoom comes with 16MB of internal memory and is equipped with a SD/MMC card slot that accepts any capacity SD or MMC flash card.

Shown here with the spacious and speedy Transcend 512MB SD card.

Power is supplied by the proprietary Kodak EasyShare KLIC-5000 or KLIC-5001 3.7V 1700mAh Li-ion pack. The KLIC-5001 supplied with the DX6490 yields up to 250 pictures per full charge. The KLIC-5000 is a lower power battery and will yield approx. 30% fewer pictures per charge.

Click to view our EasyShare 6000 Printer Dock mini-review