It’ll fit in a pocket, but we’d rather save room for a different camera.

Like many of its features, photos taken with the 10-megapixel Kodak Z1085 IS look good initially but lose their luster on closer inspection. Most images are stippled with visual noise, and background details often jumble together. An optical image stabilizer keeps many handheld shots steady, and a manual mode even lets you set the aperture and shutter speed. HD-video mode captures high-resolution video, but muddy quality looks worse than footage at a low resolution. We can’t get too excited about the Z1085, but it does manage to cover the basics.

The Z1085 takes single photos fast enough for casual shooting. Our tests clocked a small delay of up to a tenth of a second between pressing the shutter button and the image being recorded. This gap shouldn’t affect most photography, but it might make you feel a step behind when shooting sports scenes or other fast situations. More problematic, the camera took several seconds to reset itself after each shot. After shooting several in a row, it slowed down to a rate of about two pictures per 10 seconds—which is bound to make even posed groups hard to capture.

Our test images sometimes produced bright skies, even skin tones, and other great colors. But the Z1085 is heavily dependent on great lighting. Pixilation was a constant problem, with multicolored dots shuffling into shadows and even sunny foregrounds. Edge details on objects regularly came out fuzzy, and repeating patterns of rocks or leaves jumbled together. A 720p video mode records HD action. While we expected weaker results indoors—high-resolution video hogs light—even outside, the footage looked rough and lacked fidelity. Mild changes in lighting caused the camera to flicker and overcompensate, ruining the shot. HD video shot with this camera essentially looks like phonecam video, at a high resolution.