I am very impressed with the new Kodak V570 [imaging-resource.com] but almost certainly will not buy one. I probably won’t recommend it to my friends either. But I am extremely happy about it such that I hope many people buy it and use it!
Its not because I just got a new camera in October for my Birthday and not because it is a lower resolution than my current camera. Its because I don’t like Kodak cameras as much as Canon cameras.

That said, I have owned two Kodak cameras in the past; a DC265 and a DCS 330. I absolutely loved the DCS 330, but it is dated now, with its 3.2 megapixel sensor.

Anyway, the reason why I am so excited about the EasyShare V570 is that the industry is producing a reasonably priced camera with a genuine (23mm equiv) wide-angle lens. Being an avid QuickTime VR photographer for years now, I may be a bit biased to getting pictures with a great field of view, but I really think it will be useful for many everyday photographers. Holding the camera at arms length pointed at ones self takes on a whole new dimension when using a wide angle lens. Tight spaces and arid vistas are captured with incomparable spice given the adavantage of a wide-angle lens.

My setup is a Canon SD500 Digital Elph with a 1GB SanDisk Extreme III SD card. Additionally, i have a 28mm Screw Mount Adapter and Nikon WC-E63 Wide-Angle Lens Converter for a total focal-length range of 23.3mm to 117mm. @ 7.1 Megapixels. Score. And it looks way cool when I show up with this unreasonably large lens-adapter on my pocket-sized camera. I really enjoy every element of the setup, except feel the adapter was slightly overpriced. I also find my Delkin 5-in-1 Cardbus reader to perform exceptionally well, but have experienced a few problems with the Tiger version of the driver. Hopefully this will be resolved in the future.

I just got the wide-angle lens converter recently, so hopefully I’ll be posting more pictures taken with it. There is some distortion with the lens, but it is easily corrected. It certainly makes shooting the photos for a cubic QTVR easier than the wide-angle setting on the camera unassisted.
One interesting problem I have run in to is that the end of the built-in lens barrel on the SD500 is constructed of shiny metal. This unfortunately reflects light backwards in to the optics of the wide-angle converter essentially projecting a ring of light (with the focal-length markings visible) over the center of the picture, when taken in to a light source. I have come up with a solution to this problem that i think will work quite well. It is as simple as a piece of black felt placed in the adapter tube on the end of the lens. The ring-shaped piece blocks the mirror-like metal and prevents the unwanted reflection quite well. I hope to improve upon this in the future by securing it in the tube somehow, but I will need to be careful to avoid vignetting.

This setup has a few limitations; the flash is rendered inoperable with the converter mounted, as is the optical view finder. Its somewhat clunky and heavy, and not nearly as ingeniously engineered as the Kodak wide-angle solution, but wow, does a 72mm filter on the end say to my photographic subject that I mean business. In the end, I love the photos my SD500 takes with or without the adapter, and feel the camera’s software, size, and controls can’t be beat.

What do you think?