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A shameless plug here: my experience with Geeks.com has always been positive. Over the past 5 years or so, I've bought quite a few things from them, and the service has always been first-class. I can't remember ever having any problems, something that I can't even say of certain highly regarded places. All the items have always been as advertised, shipping has always been fast. I'm saying this because there are lots of shady businesses trying to sell photography equipment for cheap but that use annoying and almost illegal selling tactics. In my experience Geeks.com is certainly not one of those places. While I understand that even the best run business can sometimes have a few issues here and there and that some readers are likely to chime in and say that they had issues, I've placed enough orders with them to be able to say that those issues seem to only happen in a very small minority of cases.

With all that out of the way, let's talk about the camera. It was refurbished, as was clearly indicated on the Geeks.com web site, and came in Kodak's generic box for refurbished EasyShare cameras (i.e. it had really been in Kodak's hands before being sold as refurbished). Everything that was supposed to be in the box was there (the camera, a battery, cables for USB and video, manuals, the fitted adapter for the various Kodak EasyShare docks, and a wrist strap), and everything was in absolutely brand-new condition.

The camera runs perfectly with the supplied CR-V3 lithium battery, or with a pair of NiMH AA batteries. While Kodak doesn't recommend it because of poor battery life, I have successfully used the CX7530 with a pair of AA alkaline batteries and it worked just fine. That's certainly a very positive point since it means that suitable batteries can be found anywhere.

The camera has 32MB of internal memory, and can also use SD and MMC cards. A year ago I'd have complained about the SD slot and would have preferred a CF one, but in the last year SD cards have caught up with CF in terms of speed and price (I just paid $26 for a 512MB Kingston SD). I originally had mixed feelings about having internal memory instead of a removable card, especially as I like to transfer pictures using card readers, and I have also occasionally used memory cards to have pictures printed at my local 1-hour lab. On the other hand if the camera came with a 32MB card I wouldn't use it at all since I prefer to have more capacity, and more importantly with a non-removable memory you can't possibly end up taking the camera with you but forgetting the memory card. I speak from experience here, having ended up twice leaving home with a camera but without a memory card. It is easy to transfer images between the internal memory and the removable card, so even if you end up having to use the internal memory you can still use the memory card to move the files around. During my testing, I've found that files weigh about 1.2MB on average, ranging from about 800kB to 2MB.

It's a small camera. It fits snugly in my favorite Lowepro D-Pods 20, though there is no space for spare batteries. I've kept it at my belt for most of a day, driving, shopping, watching TV, eating out, without it ever getting in the way. That's certainly not something that I can say of my Canon 10D or of my new Canon 5D. The CX7530 definitely passes the first half of my requirements: I can carry it everywhere.

The user interface of the camera is simple. Kodak obviously made a point of not overloading the camera with too many buttons. It's possible to take pictures by only using the controls on the top panel: turn the top dial from the red "off" to the green "auto", and press the shutter release. That's it. Slightly more advanced camera controls are at the top of the rear panel: the zoom rocker, the self-timer and burst control, and the flash control. It's positively simple. The user interface is modeless, which means that as long as it's on the camera is always ready to take a picture, even if you're in the middle of reviewing pictures or changing settings in the menus. It feels so intuitive that you wonder how else a camera could work, yet other vendors manage to even mess up something that simple. The menus are easy to navigate, thanks to the 4-way control on the left of the screen. Pretty much all the usual suspects are there, though I did regret that the only real manual exposure control is for long exposures; for normal exposures you have to trust the exposure meter and need to resort to exposure compensation - more on this below. There is no significant difference in the way the menus behave between the CX7530 and the CX7220, so you can read the review of the CX7220 if you want more information in that area.

The CX7530 is part of Kodak's EasyShare range of photography tools, which means that pictures can be e-mailed and printed without having to use a computer. I didn't actually test those capabilities, so I have to trust Kodak on that one. Connecting the camera to a current Mac or to a current Linux box worked right out of the box. With an external card reader, no surprises either, the SD card is formatted as FAT16 and contains standard JPEG files.

1. "Kodak CX7530, page 1/3"
2. "Kodak CX7530, page 2/3"
3. "Kodak CX7530, page 3/3"