Everything is touch screen nowadays. Phones, computers, and beautiful yet pointless Apple products.
But I'd never had a touch-screen camera before, not until I got my hands on the new Kodak Slice. It's got 14 megapixels, which is approximately 14 times better than the camera on my otherwise lovely touch-screen phone. It lets you tag photos (and video) ready for Facebook or YouTube - the only way in which anyone ever gets to see any kind of self-produced media anymore (when was the last time you flicked through ahard-copy photo album, at least without wanting to shoot yourself to death? That's because technology has destroyed your mind).
So it's a camera without a little hole you look through (apologies, but my previous camera was a Box Brownie). The entire back of the unit is just a massive screen, where you can scroll through the various settings to take the pictures of your dreams. As a complete novice, I stuck largely to the automatic settings (i.e. the clever thing does all the hard work for you) and turned out some charming pictures of a wet weekend on the south coast. Actually, it was lucky that it wasn't too sunny, because I fear the otherwise-lovely touchscreen might become impossible to read in direct sunlight. Having said that, smearing greasy fingers all over it during the course of an afternoon didn't seem to do it much good either.
Merrie England in the rain, captured by your correspondent.
And to be honest, I didn't really cope very well with the touchscreen anyway. It's simple enough, but my generally quite slim fingers kept alighting on the wrong bit and I spent many unhappy moments missing otherwise excellent moments (Kodak moments, one might call them). I don't know, but it just seemed that some things were just better with actual buttons you could press, even if me pressing buttons on a camera is roughly akin to tourists pressing the door-opening buttons on the Tube.
One of the great things is the ability to flick through your album of snaps. And of course you get to see them on the camera's big screen, far better than the tiny previews you'd otherwise get on a digital camera. And even when you've uploaded your photos to a computer (and then probably forgotten about them - because that's the digital future), thumbails are retained on the camera for future reference. It does lots of other clever stuff too - like recognise faces and allow you to do rudimentary editing and takes high-quality film. The thing I liked best was that you didn't need any tedious software downloading to get the transfer process going - plug and play, quite literally.
And a final bonus. You don't need to buy another small plastic hunk of technology to save your photos. The camera has 2GB (which is enough for 700 top-quality photos) built in, and surely that should be enough for anyone.
The Kodak Slice camera is available now, retail price around £250 (online).
But I'd never had a touch-screen camera before, not until I got my hands on the new Kodak Slice. It's got 14 megapixels, which is approximately 14 times better than the camera on my otherwise lovely touch-screen phone. It lets you tag photos (and video) ready for Facebook or YouTube - the only way in which anyone ever gets to see any kind of self-produced media anymore (when was the last time you flicked through ahard-copy photo album, at least without wanting to shoot yourself to death? That's because technology has destroyed your mind).
So it's a camera without a little hole you look through (apologies, but my previous camera was a Box Brownie). The entire back of the unit is just a massive screen, where you can scroll through the various settings to take the pictures of your dreams. As a complete novice, I stuck largely to the automatic settings (i.e. the clever thing does all the hard work for you) and turned out some charming pictures of a wet weekend on the south coast. Actually, it was lucky that it wasn't too sunny, because I fear the otherwise-lovely touchscreen might become impossible to read in direct sunlight. Having said that, smearing greasy fingers all over it during the course of an afternoon didn't seem to do it much good either.
Merrie England in the rain, captured by your correspondent.
And to be honest, I didn't really cope very well with the touchscreen anyway. It's simple enough, but my generally quite slim fingers kept alighting on the wrong bit and I spent many unhappy moments missing otherwise excellent moments (Kodak moments, one might call them). I don't know, but it just seemed that some things were just better with actual buttons you could press, even if me pressing buttons on a camera is roughly akin to tourists pressing the door-opening buttons on the Tube.
One of the great things is the ability to flick through your album of snaps. And of course you get to see them on the camera's big screen, far better than the tiny previews you'd otherwise get on a digital camera. And even when you've uploaded your photos to a computer (and then probably forgotten about them - because that's the digital future), thumbails are retained on the camera for future reference. It does lots of other clever stuff too - like recognise faces and allow you to do rudimentary editing and takes high-quality film. The thing I liked best was that you didn't need any tedious software downloading to get the transfer process going - plug and play, quite literally.
And a final bonus. You don't need to buy another small plastic hunk of technology to save your photos. The camera has 2GB (which is enough for 700 top-quality photos) built in, and surely that should be enough for anyone.
The Kodak Slice camera is available now, retail price around £250 (online).
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