The autofocus range is 19.7 inches to infinity in normal mode and in close-up mode it covers from 3.9 to 23.6" in wideangle and from 9.8 to 33.5" in telephoto. The auto focus is high speed and low light capable with selectable multi-zone or center-zone modes.

The optical viewfinder is large and bright with framing marks and autofocus target and has dioptric adjustment. The LED on the side indicates power is on and camera is ready to capture. The color LCD is automatically turned on when you switch the camera into macro mode to avoid parallax problems with the optical finder at close range.

The built-in flash has modes for auto, fill, red-eye and forced off. The working flash range in wide is 0.5 - 5.1m (1.6 - 16.7ft.) and in tele - 0.8 - 2.6m (2.6 - 8.5ft.)

The controls are fairly simple and effective. 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. The Share button lets you select images for printing, e-mailing, or to mark as a favorite.

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 Mode Dial has positions for: Movie, Off, Auto, Sport, Portrait, Night, Landscape, Close-up and the PAS mode gives you access to Program AE, Aperture prioirty and Shutter speed priority exposure modes with a full range of other settable features,

On the top is the Drive button to select selftimer, single or burst mode. The FLASH button cycles through the Auto, Red-Eye, Fill and Off modes.

I/O ports are on the side with 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.

The DX6440 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.

Power is supplied by two AA type batteries or a CRV3 lithium pack. Kodak supplies a CRV3 one-use lithium battery with the camera. Shown here is the new Mobypower rechargeable CRV3 and Powerex 2200mAh NiMH rechargeable AA cells.

Click to view our EasyShare 6000 Printer Dock mini-review