canon a510 or kodak cx7430?

[linze2oo4]

I'm trying to decide which of these two to buy - canon a510 or the kodak cx7430. They are both in my price range, so I am wondering which one is better. The Canon is 3 mp and the Kodak is 4 mp I believe. I'm just wanting to use this for personal use, nothing professional, but I would like to have pretty good quality pictures. So, if you could recommend one or the other, it is much appreciated, thanks!

Lindsay

[jessie25]

I had a similar debate, between the Kodak CX6445 (my friend owns one and it took great pictures on a recent trip we went on) and the Canon A520. I ended up going with the A520 for the simple reason that I couldn't find the Kodak one in any store around here.

From what I've seen, the Kodak takes nice pictures, but it's a bit bulkier than the Canon, and it doesn't have manual controls like the Canon does. If you'll never use them then that's probably no big deal, but if it matters to you to have them, then that may be a deciding factor.

Canon seems to get a lot of recommendations around here, but the Kodak cameras seem to be underrated - they're a good value for the price. If you're going to use Kodak's dock system, it's probably convenient. And they have a neat feature where if you're in review mode, you can snap a photo anytime without switching back to camera mode.

On the other hand, I've had my Canon A520 for about a month now and I absolutely love it. It takes nice pictures on "auto" mode while giving the option to play around with the controls. It's compact and stylish and does everything I could want. Two minor gripes: a bit slow in flash recycle and low-light focusing, and the movie mode isn't anything wonderful. But aside from that it's a really neat little camera. I've made some fabulous prints on just point-and-shoot mode.

The Canon A510 has 4x optical zoom as opposed to 3x on the Kodak, which is nice for getting a bit closer to subjects. It also has an AF-assist lamp, handy for low-light focusing.

If 4 megapixels instead of 3.2 is important to you, consider the Canon A520 instead of the A510 perhaps? The price should be comparable to the Kodak 7430. Or, on the Kodak side you might consider the DX 6440, which has 4 megapixels, 4x optical zoom, and full manual controls.