Good buy

My hobby is painting water colour landscapes and I use a digital camera to capture scenery that I may later paint.
I certainly do not consider myself to be an expert photographer so basically what I wanted was a good quality digital camera that would be durable, do most of the thinking for me and consistently produce detailed quality shots.
I decided on the Kodak V610 because, apart from being very compact it appeared to have many features that where lacking in other digital cameras.
I have now had my V610 for 3 months and have used it in about every situation that you could think of in all kinds of weather and locations and in many bright and low lighting conditions.
The attractive low profile metal case is very strong and well made and the camera has a general feel of quality about it. Having said this, the very large and clear lcd display on the rear of the camera is useful but requires frequent cleaning to remove fingerprints and greasy marks.
The unique twin fixed lens arrangement used to obtain the high zoom index is better than having a camera where the entire lens telescopes outwards to obtain the necessary magnification, as this averts the possibility of damaging the focussing mechanism which I did this with my last camera.
The camera has a 10x optical zoom and a 4x digital zoom (giving an available total of 40x) which is amazing for such a slim camera, but use of a tripod is absolutely essential on the migher magnifications if you are to avoid camera shake.
Picture quality is generally excellent in all lighting conditions but gets a little grainy the nearer you get to ISO 800 (on the manual setting).
I found the point and shoot turn round time, that is the time taken to shoot another shot having just taken one is faster than any other digital camera that I have previously owned.
The panoramic feature enabling 180 or 360 degree scenes to be captured is faultless as is the unique in-camera movie editing editing facility. This latter feature allows you to extract a single still shot from a movie and use it as if you had taken it on it's own.
My main criticism of this camera is that there is at the moment only one bespoke battery that will fit it whose capacity only allows about 120 shots to be taken before it runs out of charge. This is ok if you only take a few shots at a time, but if you are on holiday recharging the battery frequently could pose a problem.
Obviously the way around this is to buy a spare battery and charger, but not everyone wants to go to the additional expense.
My conclusion is that is an extremely versatile and unique camera in many ways.
Over all I have to say that this camera has more than lived up to my expectations. It is one of those rare cases where you actually get better value than you pay for, and can therefore only be
recommended.