General Usage
I have been using the EasyShare V1253 for almost 3 weeks now and that has given me a good amount of time to test it out. First let’s talk about picture taking, there are 23 different shooting modes! They include portrait, panorama left-right, panorama right-left, digital image stabilization, sport, landscape, close-up, night portrait, night landscape, snow, beach, text, fireworks, flower, manner / museum, self portrait, high ISO, children, backlight, panning shot, candle light, sunset, and custom. That is sure a lot of modes to mess around with!
One thing that I really like about this camera is that you can shoot in both 4:3 and 16:9 modes, although when you shoot in 16:9 you can only shoot in 9-megapixel not the full 12-megapixel mode. This really is not a big deal because most people really do not have the need for 12-megapixel images. Here are 2 shots, the first one is shot in 16:9 and the other one is in the 4:3 mode.
Besides shooting in 12-megapixel or 9-megapixel you also can shoot all the way down to 1.2-megapixel giving you a total of 8 different resolution sizes to pick from. The large LCD more than sufficient for taking the typical point and shoot photos, it will let you know what mode you are shooting in, how many pictures you have left, what megapixel size you are shooting at, the flash mode, battery remaining, and the white balance level. Also if you press the joystick up you can remove these indicators and add more.
I mainly shot photos in the 16:9 wide angle mode when I was out and the camera performed well on that setting. One thing I did experience when using the camera was that the battery compartment would easily open up when I would go to take the camera out of my pocket. Now the battery and SD never fell out because they are locked into place but it was just annoying.
What really draws a lot of people to this camera is the video capture. The V1253 is the first compact digital camera to be able to shoot HD quality video, 720p that is. Videos are saved in QuickTime format and besides 720p you can also shoot video in 640 x 480 and 320 x 240. The back of the camera also has a small speaker on it so you can play back videos on the camera and are able to listen to the audio as well.
