Kodak DCS460

Opinion: I owned one of these for a few months during the middle of 2009 - I bought it purely out of historical interest. Back when it was new, in about 1995, it sold for $30,000 and had the highest resolution of any portable one-shot digital SLR. Nowadays the six megapixel resolution and 1.3x cropping factor are still intriguing although the camera was frustrating.

It's essentially a Nikon N90s body with a Kodak unit screwed onto the base, and the N90s body can be removed and replaced. There's no LCD screen, only a small display that shows you the battery status and remaining shots. It takes PCMCIA cards and uses a special internal battery that can be swapped out by unscrewing the bottom plate of the camera. The batteries are still available online. PCMCIA cards are hard to get hold of. My DCS 460 worked fine with adapted CompactFlash cards, but only when running off mains power.

In general I found the exposure system generally accurate, so the lack of a screen wasn't a huge problem. The 1.3x cropping factor was handy. It's fixed at ISO 80 but in practice this is very noisy - the blue channel was always blotchy no matter what the light was like. Shot-to-shot speed was about 1.5 seconds for a two-image burst followed by eight long seconds of writing to the card before the next image could be taken.

The camera has no antialiasing filter and so the images tend to be sharp out of the camera assuming you're using a good sharp lens stopped down. It will meter with older Nikon lenses. Modern versions of Photoshop still open the files.

It seemed to work well with my Nikon SB-24 flash in both bounce and direct modes, although I had to apply a fixed exposure compensation. I can't remember whether it was positive or negative.

Opinion: It's amazing how far we've come since 1995. This camera was state of the art back then. I checked out some image samples on the net and I couldn't believe how bad they were. A modern $100 compact would blow it away.

Opinion: You know I forgot that I had written this review so long ago. I still shoot with a KODAK as of Oct of 2007, but the camera is a SLRn. The 460 files processed today still look pretty good. Very sharp.........of course the camera is slow and eats batteries.........but if you can find one cheap ........use it.........its still fine at basic ISO 80 for landscapes and set up images.

Opinion: Those things are complicated and pricey, like a British sportscar need a lot of love to work well.

Any experiment with CF cards and adapters is doomed 'per se' you need to touch the Callunas, wiff it, lick it, love it, use it. With Calluna Disks works flawlessly.

But is a expensive camera, because it normally sells bareboned you need to buy some lens, charger, card because normally is dead, and a laptop to read the PCMCIA 3 cards.

You NEED to love photography to own one of those dinosaurs.

Opinion: I've been using the DCS 460 for just over a year and while (even by 2006 standards) it is old tech. it consistantly produces exceptional images and will compete with the current Nikon 12+MP cameras. No I did not pay $30,000 a body for these, like some. The main problem is getting accurate information on the use of the 460 body, there is a lot of miss-information floating around on the internet (even found some on this site?)

Opinion: This is the first digital camera opened to the market, and is by kodak Company, very very good production at that time. Great!!!

Opinion: Picked this up from Kodak when they were clearing them out. For the money, 2500 USD, it was a bargain. I have used it about 2 years now with few problems. I have 23x30's around my studio that can attest to the quality. It is slow to write to the card and can be a pain when you have to take a couple of shots in rapid succession. All in all it is a great value. I have saved thousands in just film costs in the studio and the quality of the finished product has been outstanding. I have had no complaints regarding retouching of the digital images. We had a real problem with film retouching.

Opinion: I have used Kodak DCS420, DCS315, and Nikon CP995, 990. Kodak DCS460 still stands as my choice. I do a lot of people photos and the fact this digital camera acts fast and gives 1.3 focal length factor is a beautiful neccessity. Some people have voiced software problems with Photoshop 6.0, I don't and can't figure out what problem there is. Love the camera and will use it whenever I can.

Opinion: 6.2 million large pixels with 1.25 lens factor.... what else is there to say. Beautiful, detailed files that scale up extremely well. Nikon optics and metering... Kodak/NASA research. Well worth the investment of time to make these files sing!