Kodak DC260 Digital Camera

A couple of years ago I wrote an essay about the fledgling Kodak DC20 digital camera. Given the expectations of the time, I was thrilled with it. I still have it, and I note Kodak still offers the model for sale though (as always) at a much lower price than it was going for then.

Of course, the DC20 was a bugdet model then, and digital cameras have also greatly improved since 1996. The "megapixel barrier" and other issues, including sales volume, kept the very best image qualities in the hands of the pros, whose bosses were shelling out 9 to 20,000 dollars for instant, film-quality digital images.

We bought ourselves a Kodak DC260 for both our birthdays and we are really jazzed. At 1.6 megapixels (1536 x 1024) the images are absolutely jaw-dropping. I'm not quite sure about the arithmetic, but if you assume 1,572,864 pixels spread out over 303.3 square inches that should be 5185 dpi. If that's apples to apples, it's twice the advertised resolution of the Nikon coolscan slide scanners.

For the return trip home America West had to do some plane juggling to cover our flight. They trotted out one of their 757 flagships decked out in a pretty but wild pop-art paint scheme. Trudging from the plane back up the concourse to curbside transportation, my ankle started bothering me, so I stopped to rest. We could see a beautiful panorama shot of our 757 parked at the ramp. You rarely see sights that nice, so we took a shot of it. The photo currently graces my PC multi-monitor setup and just the airplane spans 3/4 of both monitors.

The GIF inset below is heavily cropped and reduced in size from 424K to 14K. A link to a 154K JPEG reduction gives a better idea of the true color, detail and scale.

The color and detail in the original (as in even indoor pictures) is awesome. I have always had to heavily "adjust", enhance and tweak photos from the old DC20 camera in Photoshop or one of the bundled photo programs, but not this camera, indoors or out. The plane alone spans over a foot of horizontal screen real estate, the "normal" image size at this resolution, and you can read the plane's name, "City of Tucson", plainly on the side of the fuselage.

The DC260 comes with 8MB of removable Compact Flash Memory, a card about one square inch in side which fits into a PCMCIA card adapter you can buy separately for less than $20. These cards come in a variety of sizes, to at least 30MB, and this particular "Compact" configuration seems to be the only way to go.

It turns out there are about three different configurations of removable memory cards: mini, compact and "smart". Only "compact" flash memory seems to be adaptable to PCMCIA everywhere.

We originally bought a prettier and somewhat cheaper Casio QV5000 which took wonderful pictures, but was far more cumbersome to operate. We immediately returned it and bought the Kodak instead when we realized the highly-touted Casio 8MB memory was not removable!

After screwing around with picture downloads, hardware timeouts and Seattle FilmWorks digital floppies on different machines and platforms for a couple of years, removable memory was almost as important to me as high image quality.

The Kodak is not as compact as we'd been looking for, like the Casio that we returned. We initially felt that Kodaks looked, well, klunky. Given the intuitive clarity of function and parts placement on the Kodak, we've changed our mind.

The PC card adapter fits into the PowerBook 3400 and automatically mounts 8MB of memory onto the desktop (like any other removable drive) in a few seconds. We just drag and drop JPG icons to the powerbook hard drive, individually or all at once. I used no special software at all to transfer, or to read or write to the memory card, though TWAIN for the Mac is included if you want to import through Photoshop or other TWAIN-compliant programs. You can erase the card the same way, by dragging its memory contents to the trash and emptying.

For Mac, PCMCIA is the only offloading hookup supported, though for my money it's now the only way to fly. Oh yes, there is also IrDA support on both platforms. PC users have additional options of USB or parallel port downloads to the camera serial port. USB is surprisingly fast, but I was so impressed with PCMCIA that I've ordered an external SCSI PC card reader for the SCSI desktops.

We plan to experiment with the "normal" (640x480) and "small" picture size options on the DC260 too. Yet with 17-18 pictures available on the 8MB card in hi-rez (and we bought extra 10MB cards), it is easy to make the argument that if there is even a tiny chance of getting that "once in a lifetime shot", it costs nothing to take all your pictures in 1536x1024. If you download to a laptop, you could go on an extended world cruise and never worry about running out of storage.

The camera has loads of other features like burst and time lapse photography, and audio captioning, which I don't think we'll ever need. There is even video out to a TV. Other features, like an excellent easy-to-see LCD to supplement the optical viewfinder, I didn't think I'd care for but, in Kodak's case, I really appreciate. The DC260 even knows "which side is up" and orients landscape and portrait photos correctly every time.

Kodak thought of everything. One could argue that no one really needs all these features, but Kodak laid it all out so logically and thoughtfully that we actually gained a new appreciation of American design and engineering. The documentation manuals are thorough, easy to follow, and generally both simple enough for beginners and detailed enough for advanced users. Even the indexing is excellent!

At its price -- under a grand in the sense that 5,279 feet is short of a mile -- the camera expense is hard to rationalize if you can't spread the expense out over a household and a few years' time. Given that its published resolution exceeds that of the professional $8,995 digital Nikon, the Kodak, while surely not matching "big Nikon" optics, gives a visually perfect picture at large magnifications. It should be a serious player in digital photography for some years to come.