Product Reviews

Like most other technological developments, digital cameras have steadily improved in quality and dropped in price since the first consumer devices appeared in the mid-1990s. The current pick of the crop is Kodak's DC210 camera (reviewed issue 40, p183), which boasts a place in the PC Pro A List (see p66), although the prize for the best picture quality currently belongs to Olympus' excellent C-1400L (reviewed issue 41, p184).

Kodak's answer to the C-1400L is the DC260, a camera that features the highest resolution of any we've reviewed. The DC260's CCD (charge coupled device) features a total of 1.6 million pixels, and produces 1,536 x 1,024 resolution pictures, which is a considerable improvement over the 1,280 x 1,024 resolution images you get with an Olympus C-1400L.

The DC260 isn't, unfortunately, quite as well designed as the Olympus, nor can it boast an SLR (single lens reflex) viewfinder. Taking some cues from the design of its predecessor, the DC210, the DC260's inelegant and rather lumpy looking lines turn out to be ergonomically challenging. In order to hold the camera without smearing the LCD with your thumb or blocking the flash with a finger, you have to contort your hand into some uncomfortable positions. It feels far too cramped.

Reviewing pictures and changing settings, on the other hand, is relatively painless. Using a small thumb-operated directional pad on the rear of the camera you can flick through Kodak's bright and cheerful GUI (graphical user interface) with ease, setting picture quality, adjusting white balance, text or logo watermarks and organising pictures into folders. Photographs can either be displayed full-screen, as thumbnails, or you can apply magnification and scroll around for a closer look.

The menu system also allows you to adjust the settings for taking photographs in Burst and Timelapse modes. The former mode lets you take photographs in rapid succession - up to a maximum of 3fps (frames per second) - and the latter allows you to take pictures at up to 24-hour intervals. If you really want to exploit the full flexibility of digital photography, you can add your own audio commentary to each photograph.

Like the Olympus and the DC210 before it, the DC260 features a zoom lens equivalent to a

Pictures are stored using the 8Mb CompactFlash card that comes with the camera. In the highest resolution mode using the lowest level of compression, you'll fit around 16 photographs on one card. If you need more capacity you can either go to medium (1,152 x 864) or standard (768 x 512) resolution, set a higher compression rate, or simply shell out for another memory card. An extra 4Mb will set you back £59, while the larger 10Mb and 20Mb cards cost £101 and £169 respectively.

As long as you use the best quality settings, you won't be disappointed with the DC260. It's a close run thing, but in a side-by-side comparison with the Olympus C-1400L and the newer C-840L (reviewed p167), the Kodak just manages to win. As you'd expect from a camera sporting a 1.6 million pixel CCD, the DC260 turns in a pretty impressive performance, with a superior level of detail capture that was quite noticeable on close inspection. Putting it succinctly, this is the best quality I've seen from a digital camera yet.

Getting the pictures from the camera onto your PC can be achieved in a number of ways. Easiest of the lot is by using the USB connection - the first digital camera I've seen to support it. As long as you've got USB set up correctly, your PC will detect the camera as soon as you plug it in and prompt you to install the software from the driver disk. There is, of course, the option to connect the camera to a serial port if you don't have the benefit of USB, but it's considerably slower and not quite as slick to install. As with the DC210, the DC260 software gives you the option to install the camera so that Windows sees it as a logical drive in the Explorer window. There's also a TWAIN module for acquiring images directly from applications, and Kodak also bundles copies of Picture Easy, Adobe PhotoDeluxe and Adobe PageMill 2.

In light of Kodak's previous pricing policy for its cameras, it comes as no surprise to find that the DC260 comes with a reasonable price tag of £765. Good value for money, you might think, especially for a camera of this quality. This time, however, Olympus has beaten Kodak to it. Its C-840L may not deliver quite the same quality as the DC260, but it's a whopping £255 cheaper, just pipping Kodak to the Recommended award.