Review on 📷 Kodak PIXPRO Astro Zoom AZ652-BK: Powerful 65X Optical Zoom 20MP Digital Camera with 3" LCD (Black) by Darby Perkins

This camera is amazing value in so many ways. It has an incredible 65x zoom and its image stabilization works great to give you blur-free images for manual telephoto and low-light shooting. I have never experienced such image stabilization. It has a very nice tilting LCD and of course an eyepiece viewfinder. I appreciated its light weight and ability to take close-up macro shots. I didn't film the video at all so this review is based on photography only. There are a few bugs that stand in the way of your enjoyment. The main problem I constantly encountered was camera defocusing at a moderate zoom. It is focused and then defocused. The only way to focus is to change the zoom level up or down. At this point, you may have missed the opportunity to take a photo. I've also had my camera freezes a few times and had to remove and reinsert the battery to restart the camera. This was in cold weather so it could be related as my iPhone sometimes does the same thing in the cold when the battery can't provide the power it needs. The difference is that the iPhone turns off and this camera freezes. The image sensor is perhaps what you'd expect from a "bridge camera" like this, but I can't honestly say that "this camera takes really good pictures". The feeling I get from my iPhone 6 photos is that they are better overall. A lot of that, I think, is down to the very limited "dynamic range" of this camera, which essentially means its ability to handle scenes that contain both light and dark areas, which I've found to be a common occurrence. This camera often washes white out. The iPhone has an automatic HDR mode to deal with this and it's true that this camera also has HDR (which takes 3 pictures and merges them) but you have to go through the menu every time you turn on the camera to enable HDR. , and then the shooting will be slower and the battery will be consumed faster. The camera has another mode called WDR but it didn't help me. I think this mode is really for video scenes. But even without HDR processing, a good camera should be able to produce decent images for high-contrast scenes, and this camera really falls short.