Digital Camera News: Black Friday Brawls, EasyShare One is a Winner, EasyShare Gallery Reviewed

Black and Blue Friday

The day after Thanksgiving in the US is known as Black Friday, marking the biggest shopping day of the year, full of sales and other great deals. Sometimes it gets out of hand though. Wal Mart had a particularly rough incident when shoppers began throwing punches over a sub-$400 notebook and other discounted goods. It wasn't all bad though, most people had a safe shopping experience, albeit with long waits. Some people at Target for instance were grabbing up Kodak digital cameras for 50% off.

Kodak EasyShare One Wins Innovation 2006 Design and Engineering Award

Kodak took home some hardware for their wireless EasyShare One digital camera, along with the EasyShare Photo Printer 500. The awards are sponsored by the Consumer Electronics Association and issued prior to the Consumer Electronics Show, which takes place in January each year.

For more on the Kodak EasyShare One, read our full review:

As the first wireless-enabled Point and Shoot camera to hit the shelves, the Kodak EasyShare One has some high expectations to live up to. While it isn't pushing any envelopes with camera specs (4 megapixels), the camera has a 3 inch touch screen LCD and 256 MB of internal memory to allow easy viewing and sharing of images. The way that Kodak is differentiating themselves from the other wireless enabled cameras (Nikon Coolpix P1, Nikon Coolpix P2, and Canon SD430) is to really make it easier to share your pictures -- with friends and family from almost anywhere.

Kodak EasyShare One Review

BusinessWeek.com Reviews Kodak EasyShare Gallery

There are a ton of options when it comes to printing digital images. Photo printers are so cheap and easy, many are going that route. Grocery, drug and mass retailers offer printing kiosks that take any memory card and print out great images too. Kodak's EasyShare Gallery is a bit of a hybrid, but allows loading and editing photos on their online system pretty easily.

Once "Easy Upload" is installed, which is done painlessly, digital pictures can be uploaded at the tip of a mouse with a mere drag and drop. During our review, the system did freeze unexpectedly and crashed our Internet Explorer browser, which reminded us that the technology is still in its infancy. The pictures that had already been loaded were properly saved on Kodak's server, and could be edited with ease. The usability of these advanced features is indeed excellent. It is possible to crop, resize, zoom in and out, add frames of all sorts, and much more. Although the system is remarkably fast and responsive, we found that there are still too many steps and screens. More...