Kodak DC260 review

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 38-115mm lens on a 35mm film-based camera. To extend this, the camera also features a 2x digital zoom, which comes into operation only when the LCD is being used to frame a shot. This seems a little pointless, however, when you can achieve the same effect by using any imaging-editing application to enlarge a portion of the picture. An irritating feature of the zoom lens is that it insists on extending, even when in connect or review modes. Surely it would have been sensible to save the strain on the camera's four AA batteries by avoiding having to power a motor every time the camera is turned on.

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.