New top-of-the-line digital camera by John Henshall
This is a camera for 'Professional Performance, digital speed and Freedom'. Kodak designed this camera to shoot high resolution digital images anywhere -- hand held, with no cables to trip over. The camera is aimed at a wide market, from studio to location fashion. Kodak's publicity shows a model being photographed in a boat -- completely feasible as this camera does not need to be tethered to a computer. My assistant, Gilly Russell, and I borrowed a DCS560 for a day while in San Francisco. Unfortunately my lovely Canon-fit Tokina AT-X lenses were back in the UK and we only had a Canon 28mm lens.
The DCS560 has outstanding image resolution with a new six megapixel CCD which, like the DCS520, has improved colour analysis. Each pixel of the new CCD is analysed by twelve bits. Unlike the DCS460 -- which it replaces -- which had a fixed ISO equivalence of ISO80, the DCS560 has variable sensitivity which may be set anywhere between ISO80 and ISO200. The camera can shoot at one frame per second for three consecutive frame captures before it has to take a pause to write the images to the PCMCIA card.
A big advantage of this camera is the built in colour LCD that lets you check composition and evaluate exposure and histogram information on the spot, without a long processing time. As in the DCS520, I continue to be suspicious of the internal anti-aliasing filter which seems to soften the images slightly. But there is so much real data there that the images respond well to a little sharpening in Photoshop. And no aliasing is apparent. This article first appeared as "John Henshall's Chip Shop" in "The Photographer" magazine, October 1998. IMPORTANT NOTICE This document is Copyright © 1998 John Henshall. All rights reserved. This material may only be downloaded for personal non-commercial use. Please safeguard the future of online publishing by respecting this copyright and the rights of all other authors of material on the Internet. |