DC50 page
The DC50 from Kodak was a digital still camera intended for the consumer market. It originally retailed for approximately US$1000, or about $1400 in Canada. I picked one up in 1997 at a Computer City store in Toronto, Ontario for $1250 Canadian after pricing it at a local camera store for $1450. I eventually sold the camera and replaced it with a Nikon 950. Digital camera technology keeps moving on, and that camera in turn is now obsolete.
This was basically a point-and-shoot camera with a built-in flash, auto-exposure, 3:1 zoom lens and a macro setting. The flash could be set to fire when there wasn't enough light, all the time, or could be turned off completely. Focusing was automatic down to a couple of feet, or on the macro setting was fixed at 18 inches. There was limited control of the auto-exposure via the LCD control panel at the rear of the camera. The control panel could be used to:
The camera accepted type I or II PCMCIA (ATA) flash RAM cards to extend the number of images which could be stored in the camera. Without a card you could store 7 images at the highest quality setting, 11 at medium quality, and 22 at low quality. A 4Mb flash card gave you an an extra 24 Best quality images.
The image size was 756 x 504 pixels 24-bits deep with a nominal resolution of 144 dots per inch. There are sample images available....
A limited edition of PhotoEnhancer was provided with the camera, but there was no Photoshop plug in and there was no support in Photoshop 3.0 for Kodak's file format, so you had to use PhotoEnhancer to get the image from the camera to your computer. The connection from camera to computer was via a serial port, and the speed of the serial connection depended upon the capacity of the computer. My Mac supported 230 kbps connections, but transfers seemed slow - it's possible the software did not support this speed on my Mac (the documentation supplied on disk seems to suggest that the camera does handle fast connections). If your computer could accept flash cards, you could also transfer images by treating the card as a standard DOS drive..
File sizes depended on which of three quality settings were chosen: typical values for each of the three quality settings were about 168 kb, 120 kb, 80 kb. Click here for a page showing a small cropped image at each quality setting.
The camera was decidedly not a professional grade camera, but it didn't pretend to be. It was a useful camera for quick Web page images and for newsletter content. If the price had been a little lower it would have been fine as a consumer grade camera, but at the release date it was still much more expensive than a good film-based camera with the same feature set - and spending the same cash on a film camera put you at the high end of amateur equipment. Call it a toy with ambitions.
The camera was supplied with a fabric hand strap which forced you to carry the camera in your right hand (I'm left-handed). You couldn't carry the camera around your neck because the loops for the strap were only on one side of the camera, so that even if you replaced the hand strap with a longer strap it would hang sideways and be awkward to use.
The camera was turned on by pulling the flash out from the body. This exposed the viewfinder lens which was protected when the cover was closed. The main camera lens was left exposed all the time, handy so any little ding could scratch or trash it. There was no easy way to cover the lens, and the flash was also exposed at all times.
[Third party lens covers, as well as various accessory lenses, were available.]
For that matter the LCD control panel was flush with the rear of the camera, so that also seemed likely to get scratched sometime in the camera's life.
The viewfinder was purely optical, with the lens slightly offset from the camera lens. This was great for battery conservation, but not so hot when you wanted to know in advance exactly what was in the frame (I blew more pictures that way - too used to my SLR).
Those were primarily design issues which could be changed. One gripe Kodak couldn't resolve in a later model was the price of memory cards. That was a serious limitation on the camera since the 7 image standalone limit was wholly inadequate. Eventually the market price came down, but too late for this camera.
The sketch of the camera was derived from a promotional photo of the camera. Painter 3.1 and PhotoShop 3.0.5 were used in creating the image.