The Easyshare V550 is equipped with a high quality 3x aspheric all-glass Schneider- Kreuznach optical zoom lens with a 36--108 mm f/2.8--4.8 (35mm film equivalent) focal length coverage. The lens retracts into the camera when powered down and is protected by a built in lens shutter.

Auto focus is handled by a contrast detect TTL system with multi-zone and center zone options and single AF or continuous AF modes. The Normal focus range is: 24 in. (0.6 m) -- Infinity, 2 -- 28 in. (0.05 -- 0.7 m) in macro/wide, 16 -- 28 in. (0.4 -- 0.7 m) in macro/tele and 10 m -- Infinity in landscape. There is a focus-assist lamp for low light auto focusing.

The indoor/outdoor 2.5-inch wide view color LCD has 230,000 pixels of resolution and a viewing angle of 170 degrees. It can also be used as a live viewfinder with a fast framerate of 24fps and for viewing your images and movies and accessing the menu screens.

The eyelevel optical viewfinder zooms in and out with the lens and shows about 82% of the captured image. There is no diopter adjustment.

The built-in speedlight has a shooting range of approx. 2 - 7.9 ft (0.6 - 2.4m) @ Wide; 2 - 5.2 ft (0.6 - 1.6m) @ Tele at ISO Auto and can be set for Auto Flash, Red-Eye Reduction, Fill Flash or Disabled.

On top are four illuminated buttons for selecting Auto, Portrait, Scene or Movie mode. Next is the power on/off switch, flash mode selector and the shutter release.

Controls on the back: Upper right are the zoom lens controls, in playback they function as the zoom-in and zoom-out controls for inspecting the magnified image. Below that are two LED indicators for Record and Favorite mode, selected by a slide switch on the side (not shown.) The 4-way selector is for navigating menus and selecting pictures. In record mode pressing it "Up" toggles the amount of information displayed on the LCD and turns it on/off. Pressing it "Down" enables the macro/infinity focus mode. The OK button accepts menu selections.

On the left side, below the optical viewfinder is the Delete button, Menu button, Review button and the Share button.

The interface connector is a combination port to connect the USB cable for downloading images to Mac and Windows computers or to a PictBridge enabled photo printer. The Audio-Video Out cable for viewing on a TV set is also connected here. The video signal is selectable for NTSC or PAL. On the other side of the camera is a DC IN jack for the AC power supply when not using the docking cradle.

The V550 has ~32MB of internal memory and a SD memory card slot, no card is supplied with the camera. Images, movies and sound recordings can be copied from internal memory to SD card or vice-versa. We recommend the purchase of at least a 256MB SD card (or 1GB if doing a lot of movies).

The V550 is powered by a proprietary KODAK Li-Ion Digital Camera Battery KLIC 7001 rated at 3.7v / 720mAh. The battery is charged whenever the camera is placed in the included Photo Frame Dock 2 (see below).

An optional 5V power adapter allows the camera to be powered from an A/C wall outlet.

The included Kodak Photo Frame Dock 2 when connected to your host computer allows for quick and simple "one button" downloads of images and movies. It can also be connected to a TV for slideshow presentations. The camera's battery is automatically charged whenever it is placed in the docking cradle. A completely depleted battery will be fully charged in about three hours.

The V550 is also compatible with the optional $149.95 Kodak Printer Dock Series 3 which does everything the supplied Photo Frame Dock 2 does -plus- it's a 4 x 6-inch dye sub photo printer. Simply place your camera on the Printer Dock, select the photo you want to print on the camera's color LCD and then press the Print button! That's all there is to it - anybody can make photo-quality prints that look and last as long as conventional film camera jumbo prints.

See our Printer Dock mini-review for more information.