Kodak PIXPRO Astro Zoom AZ652-BK 20MP Digital Camera with 65X Optical Zoom and 3" LCD (Black)

I used to have a Sony compact digital camera years ago. Loved how beautiful the pictures came out. It broke after years of use. Then I got used to using my cellphone for pictures, and video. After looking and comparing the quality of both. I decided I needed a new camera, that is meant for taking serious photos.I looked around and thought this would be the best one on my budget. It's not too expensive, and not too cheap. I love the WiFi sync through the phone. It has all the controls that more expensive camera have.The zoom is amazing.Pictures are great. Video is also beautiful. Just that it makes noise when zooming while shooting video.I plan on getting filters that can be mounted on lens.WiFi connection is great for on the road downloading. It can give a WiFi signal that your phone connects to to download files to share via phone tablet, or computer. Just need app installed.Because of lock down here in California. I haven't used it as much as I would like to. The moon photos were taken free hand. I plan on getting tripod with longer exposure time to make photos even clearer.I am very happy with purchase.Update: I've had this camera for over 3 months now. I got a tripod for stills, and moon shots. Such a huge difference. I also purchased density, and polarized lenses. I'll include new shots in. I'm still learning slot on how to utilize this camera to it's fullest. First 2 shots of moon were hand held, ones after was tripod. Foliage shots were shot with bokeh effect in the background depending where you focused at. I focused on gate ball, then focused on tree leaves the make fence blur.Also the zoom in camera doesn't stop at 65. Digital zoom goes to 260. And 256GB mirco memory card w/adapter from Samsung works fine. I want to try 512GB card later.

Extremely happy with this camera . Able to capture great shots of the moon . The imagine stability is one of the kind . When I first started using the camera it wouldn’t focus full zoom , but last nite I captured the moon with little effort at all. I would certainly recommend this camera and I brought it renewed and it came in perfect condition . What a bang for my buck !!!! Easy to operate and packed with a lot of neat features. Take your time learning how to use the camera and it won’t let you down .

This camera is an amazing value in many ways. It has an incredible zoom, 65x, and its image stabilization works beautifully to give you non-blurred images for hand held telephoto and low-light shots. I've never experienced image stabilization like that before. It has a very nice tilting LCD and of course an eyepiece viewfinder as well. I appreciated its light weight and the ability to take macro photos at very close range. I did not shoot video at all, so this review is based only on still shooting.There are a couple of bugs that do tend to get in the way of a fully enjoyable experience. The principal one I kept running into was the camera unfocusing at moderate zoom levels. It would focus and then unfocus. The only way to get it to focus was to change the zoom level up or down, and by that time you may have lost your photo opportunity. I also had the camera freeze a couple of times, and had to pop out the battery and push it back in to reset the camera. This was in cold weather, so perhaps that was related, as my iPhone will sometimes do the same in the cold, when the battery cannot provide the necessary power. The difference is that the iPhone shuts off, whereas this camera froze.The image sensor may be what is expected from a "bridge camera" such as this, but unfortunately I cannot honestly say "this camera takes really good pictures." The sense I get from my iPhone 6 photos is that they are better in general. A lot of that has to do I think with this camera's very limited "dynamic range", which essentially means the ability to handle scenes containing both bright and dark areas, which in my experience occurs frequently. With this camera, the whites are often washed out. The iPhone has an auto-HDR mode to handle this, and it is true that this camera also has HDR (which takes 3 shots and combines them), but you have to go through the menus every time you turn on the camera to enable HDR, and then taking photos becomes slower and uses the battery more quickly. The camera has another mode called WDR, but I didn't find it helpful. I think that mode is really intended for video scenes. But even without HDR processing, a good camera ought to be able to produce decent images for high contrast scenes, and this camera really does not make the grade.

Auto focus is a little slow, zoom is very far, but the optical image stabilizer doesn’t work well in half zoom and full zoom. Can take pictures in low light however, but videos are dark even when exposed at high levels. Using photoshop can fix the problem, but can become very noisy and grainy. That’s typical some cameras. Noise and grain in photos can be adjusted with ease in photoshop. Photos and videos are very crisp during the day. Sound quality is great in video mode. Over all I’m very satisfied with this camera. It suits my needs very well and I’m able to compromise to get great pictures and videos.