Review on Kodak PIXPRO AZ252 WH Digital Optical by Michael Hellewell

UPDATE: I took off another star because when it's off and theoretically doing nothing but holding the clock, it kills a set of 4 Lithium Energizer AAs in less than 9 months. Last July I had to replace the batteries as they died on their own the last time, then I took 3 pictures that day and put them back in the case to date (April 2021) and now they are dead. If not for a short time died before today, he probably ran out of batteries before that. For comparison I have an old Canon a720 (only uses 2 AA) that has sat for about the same amount of time and still works. The original review is below, unchanged. This camera is a little difficult to compare as only a few mainstream brands models are still available (Kodak Pixpro is a third party trademark licensed generic). Overall image quality is a little below Canon, but current Canon models in this range and slightly higher have almost no manual controls. So the benefit here is manual control at a lower cost that matches the image quality. Not bad. My biggest complaint is that the autofocus can stutter, and while there's a manual mode that controls both aperture and shutter speed, there's no manual focus. In macro photography it consistently focused slightly past where I wanted it to (despite being set to center/spot). I had to prefocus with a half press and then move the camera back. The ability to set a slow shutter speed for night shots is usually a benefit of manual control, but when it's a distant night shot autofocus can't find anything to focus on, so you end up with a well-exposed blur. There's no way to set it manually, not even a forced toggle to infinity. It's going to be nothing more than an in-camera menu option that already has a lot of on-screen settings (like the auto/macro pop-up menu), but I think whoever designed this just didn't realize it was something that you might need . . It's still not bad if you need a long zoom during the day and don't want to get macro shots too close.