Make room in your camera bag: Eastman Kodak’s second-generation digital Nikon F5 — the Kodak Professional DCS 620x Digital Camera — boasts much longer battery life than the first generation DCS 620, adds noise-reduction circuitry that yields cleaner images, and delivers superb low-light capabilities. Indeed, the 620x boasts the lowest light capability of today’s digital cameras, making it an especially good choice for sports, law enforcement, military, and other low-light uses. As you’d expect, however, this camera is hardly cheap: The 620x body, which includes battery, charger, AC adapter, and Firewire cable, carries a hefty suggested retail price of $10,295. Look for a street price in the vicinity of $6,500.
Good Breeding
The 620x builds on the Nikon F5 body and benefits from all the features of the F5, with the obvious exception of those specific to film handling (multiple exposure capabilities, for instance). You get the same renowned Nikon mechanics and the same selection of superb Nikon lenses, and you’ll still find manual, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and full program exposure modes. Nikon’s 3D Matrix metering consistently delivers excellent exposures.
Kodak incorporated a new 2-megapixel (1,728 by 1,152 pixel) ITO (indium tin oxide) CCD into the 620x, giving the camera a color-calibrated ISO range of between 400 and 4000. While the 620x can operate at up to ISO 6400, accurate color rendition is not promised above ISO 4000. The CCD’s relatively large pixel elements (13 micrometers in diameter) are largely responsible for the camera’s enhanced light sensitivity.
Also contributing to the higher ISO capability is a new Complementary Bayer filtration pattern, which uses cyan-, magenta-, and yellow-sensitive filters instead of conventional RGB filters. This strategy lets more light through the filters and to the light-sensitive elements of the sensor, effectively cranking up the light sensitivity.
Saving Graces
Images are stored in the camera using Kodak’s proprietary 36-bit TIFF format. The camera can output images in this raw file format, as 12-bit TIFFs, or JPEG files. Associated with each image is a series of metadata, including exposure parameters, date and time, and image number. Additionally, an internal microphone in the camera lets users store voice annotations with each image. Finally, precise geographical location data can be captured with images by connecting the camera to almost any of the common GPS units available today.
The 620x can upload images from the field via a cell phone or modem connection, which could help you meet impending deadlines. Alternatively, images may be transferred from camera to a host computer via IEEE 1394 connection. In case your machine isn’t configured for Firewire, there’s also the option of removing the PC Card hard drive from the camera and transferring images using a PC Card reader.
For fast action shooting, the 620x can capture 3.5 frames per second in bursts of 12 images before writing data to its PC Card hard drive. Its new NiMH batteries increase the useful life of a charge from roughly 300 shots (with the 620) to more than 1000, depending upon how much one uses the color LCD display.
We like the versatility of the 620x’s bright, color LCD display, which enables one of our favorite features of Kodak’s professional camera line: the patented histogram display. This display shows the relative numbers of pixels across the tonal range of an image in a bar-graph format, letting photographers quickly evaluate each exposure to determine whether it captured the highlight and shadow detail desired. The display can also be toggled to show highlight areas in an image, facilitating quick visual evaluation of exposure quality. In addition, of course, the LCD affords access to the camera’s extensive menus and lets users view single images or thumbnails of images stored in the camera.
We also liked the camera’s bright viewfinder and the fact that it is WYSIWYG, showing exactly the view that will be captured by the CCD. Our review unit included a 28mm, f:2.8 autofocus Nikon lens — effectively a “normal” lens for a digital SLR of this nature.
Picture This
We were able to shoot with the 620x for a couple of weeks, giving us the opportunity to test it under a variety of light conditions. We found that exposures were generally consistent and of acceptable quality up to around 4000. Beyond 4000, in low light, colors seemed to stray toward greens and blues. Using the camera’s 2-stop exposure compensation controls, we played around with pushing the effective ISO setting beyond 6400. We were able to capture images at these settings, but the sensor captured mainly luminance data without much chrominance information, making the images essentially monochromatic.
Generally, the 620x delivered images that were very crisp. Details in shadow areas were sharp and clean. Overall color balance was good, thanks in part to the camera’s automatic white-balance feature. Our review unit included Kodak’s combination anti-aliasing and infrared filter, which can be removed by the user, if desired. Also available for the 620x is a behind-the-lens hot-mirror IR filter ($115 SRP), which may be used in place of the anti-aliasing filter.
We liked Kodak’s DCS Acquire module and TWAIN module, which meshed nicely with Photoshop. The software let us select and tag images for download, deletion, or processing. It also let us enter IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) data for each image — useful for stock or service photographers. In general, the software was intuitive and easy to use.
Badge of Honor
The Kodak DCS 620x earned a Seybold Editors’ Hot Pick award at Seybod San Francisco in August, and there’s little wonder why: The Nikon F5 is a great choice for professional photographers who need a full-featured 35mm camera, and Kodak has done a fine job of putting together a digital version worthy of its F5 foundation. Pair Nikon’s optics and mechanics with Kodak’s high-end sensor and image-processing technology, and you have a professional’s digital camera that’s well worth its price. The biggest drawback for many would-be buyers may be this camera’s by-now-passe 2-megapixel resolution.
Read more by Matthew Klare.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on October 4, 2000
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