review: Kodak DC20 Digital Camera

When I was a kid (and when my parents were young), Kodak introduced a revolutionary new compact camera for the masses. No frills, no fuss, no focus bellows, no features: it had a small, simple fixed lens, a peep viewfinder, a button you could press to take a "snapshot", and a place to put in and remove the clumsy paper-backed film rolls of the time. It was called the "Brownie", a term that became a popular generic word for any point-and-shoot camera. It spawned a host of imitators, changed the way America thought about photography, and was a household word until perhaps the sixties. I was recently crushed to discover someone this year who'd never heard of the "Brownie"!

Is the Brownie back, in Digital form? Perhaps so. Is the DC20 a new "Brownie?" The critics don't think so, but I do. The DC20 is the size of a pack of cigarettes, weighs four ounces with strap, and has one of everything the Brownie had, plus a power button and some indicator lights. No flash, no autofocus, no LCD viewfinder. It's not a Leica, Nikon or $13,999 digital. It's cheap (for digital) at just over $300. I bought mine at Ritz camera for $329 when all I really came for was a $10 battery for my Nikon SLR.

MacUser reviewers aren't giving any presently made camera under $1,000 more than three "mice" ratings. That's their privilege, but you can see that the reviewers are comparing the consumer cameras to the high-end, over $10,000 digital toys lying around all over their offices. I think they're spoiled.

The complaints are: image quality, and download speed.

Right off the bat, I'll tell you that image quality will not meet the expectations of professional photographers. We consumers will argue over which has the "better" image quality, the $329 camera or the $499 camera, and I'll tell you they're both far from professional. But so was the "Brownie". I already have cameras for the "perfect" image. I bought this one for fun, like the old Brownie, and for instant Macintosh access to my own digital images.

But anybody's bound to be pleased with their "first" digital camera. How good is the DC20? I've taken a few "rolls" of images indoors and out, and I'd compare the images very favorably with the original Apple Quicktake. The camera works amazingly well under poor indoor lighting conditions. Remember, no flash. Color balance is fair, there are some color artifacts, but I have not experienced any which would be objectionable if you are just showing snapshots... Focus is better than you'd expect for such a tiny fixed lens. The DC20 operates from about 1-1/2 feet to infinity.

Images are pleasant to look at without enhancement, but almost all benefit from some adjustment, and the adjustments are easy to make. The software comes with image enhancement tools ("adjust this picture so it looks like that picture") which is very simple to operate. It produces very good results. I used my own Photoshop at first, because I'm already used to it, and the pictures consistently seemed to benefit a little from a single "sharpen" and about 10% more yellow. I used the Kodak software next. It does an amazing job (far better than I can do in Photoshop), producing images with very pleasing and consistent color saturation and contrast.

The DC20 has difficulty with very delicate shades, despite recording images in millions of colors, and was unable to distinguish between pink and sherbet-orange on an unusual gladiola bloom. Focus at 2 feet is so-so. On the other hand, color realism, color balance and focus on my Ford Bronco (at 10 feet) was startingly good.

Software loads only from a CD-ROM, which isn't going to please anyone without a CD player. There's no other way to do it. The basic installation includes Kodak's Photoenhancer Special Fun, which handles loads, camera control, and - you guessed it - image enhancement. You can create slideshows and albums with the software, which shows a lot of thought in design. The installation was fast and glitch-free, and requires AppleScript and System 7.5 or newer to run the software. The software is Mac-aware and Mac-friendly. The application can be installed as "fat" or PowerPC, and it likes about 7MB of RAM. "Extras" include Kai's Power Goo, for distorting faces and other very mature photofinishing tasks.

The DC20 downloads to the Mac serial port (either modem or printer, and it correctly finds whichever it is hooked to) with a generous 6' adapter cord. The camera and software are packaged to operate with both a Mac and PC.The user and software manuals are spartan, and it took me a bit to figure out how to actually transfer images to my hard drive. Apple Guide help is available and useful, and Kodak supports the camera and accessories (lense attachments, etc.) at their web site address at http://www.kodak.com

Image transfer from camera to hard drive is slow, since you must go through the Kodak software (i.e., view the pictures) to access the images. The DC20 mounts all its images at once to the software thumbnail strip, then you transfer the ones you want to full-size viewing windows. Only when you switch to the background and "save" those full-size images, will they be safely onboard the hard drive. "Save" and "save as" options are TIFF, PICT, GIF or JPEG, all convenient and sensible options.

Once you have the thumbnails on your screen, you do not really need the DC20 turned on, and can power it off to save battery. You will need to switch power back on later, to erase the old images when they have been saved.I can hook up the camera and offload the images in 5 minutes or less. Professionals might not put up with this, though they happily wait a week for Kodak film developing. My advice to the critics is to save their whining until there is a better product on the market at a cheaper price.

You can erase the old images either from the software or from the camera, but you cannot erase selectively. It's all or nothing. And the camera contains no switch to change resolutions; this must be done from the software. A more expensive camera would allow "switching", and give you an image or RAM counter to see how many you actually had left. The DC20 flashes a red "full" LED when you have 2 pictures left, which turns to solid red when the memory is full.

The DC20 comes with 1MB RAM (not expandable) which stores 8 "high" resolution images (493 x 373 pixels, 24-bit), or 16 "standard" images (320 x 240, also 24-bit). For the kind of work a low-end digital camera is good for, I would have expected the standard resolution to be acceptable and visibly not much different than the higher resolution. But I was wrong. The "standard" resolution I've experimented with is not very good at all. I would have paid more money for more RAM, but it's all you get. Storage is the biggest "negative" for this cheapest of digital cameras.

I find the camera very useful for newsletter and web page images and e-mail snaps, and the software is pleasant and simple to operate. There is a lot of information in those images. Images "saved" to disk as TIFF are 560K each. JPEG's compress to well under 200K, depending on how much color information is present. These images, of course, can all be viewed with standard graphics software or shareware (such as Photoshop or GraphicConverter), which is a vast improvement in usability over the high-end Kodak CD-ROM 'PCD' format. PICTS can of course be pasted directly into any DTP, word processor page, or Kodak's clever card and notepaper software..

You would not want to leave your best film cameras at home and take the DC20 to the Grand Canyon, or Tibet, even if you travel with a PowerBook -- which you would have to do, in order to support today's digital photography away from home.The DC20 is naturally a lot more portable than the Color QuickCam, which is tethered to a serial port umbilical cord. From what I can tell from the reviews, DC20 picture quality is far better than Color QuickCam, which has been criticized for graininess.

I didn't even consider buying the higher-end (but below $1000) digital cameras, because I felt my expectations for the money would be too high. When it's the only shot of its kind you'll ever get in a lifetime, it's got to be right, and that means very expensive professional film or digital cameras. Digital photography will be "here" for serious amateur photography before we know it, but it's not here now. For digitizing those once-in-a-lifetime photos, scanning will be the only way to go for quite some time to come.

But, let's face it. I'm having lot of fun with my DC20, which is why I bought it in the first place.