May 17, 1996

Kodak launches DC 20 'point and shoot' digital camera

Targets personal creativity at home, sharing pix online

Point and shoot. The design goal for the DC 20 was extreme ease of use. There are only three buttons on it: one for power on and off; a shutter button to take pictures and another to erase pictures. Period. Indicator lights tell the user if the camera is on or off and when its memory is full.

The camera does not have particularly high resolution. The camera's 1-MB permanent memory stores either eight images at 493x373 pixels or 16 images at 320x240 pixels. The image sensor is not manufactured by Kodak (as it is in the DC 40 and 50) but rather is a video image sensor of undisclosed manufacture. The lens is of the fixed-focus variety. The camera automatically sets the exposure. Shutter speeds vary from 1/30 to 1/4,000 second. The camera has an ISO equivalent value of 800 or 1,600 depending on lighting conditions.

The whole intent is to broaden consumer use of digital pictures by allowing them to have fun and to express themselves with digital pictures in a variety of ways.

Fun version of PhotoEnhancer. Like Kodak's other point-and-shoot cameras, the DC 40 and DC 50, the DC 20 is shipped with a version of PictureWorks Technology's PhotoEnhancer -- in this case the Special Fun Edition. It lets users download pictures from the camera into a Mac or PC via a standard serial interface. It also lets them drop the pictures into greeting cards, invitations, calendars and the like. Templates and icons that present simple image manipulations make this as easy as possible.

Entertainment courtesy of Kai. Also included with the camera is Kai's Power Goo from MetaTools, which lets users distort pictures in all sorts of ridiculous ways. The distortions can be saved for application to other images. And the images themselves can be used in AVI or QuickTime movies, output to videotape or played as After Dark screen savers.

So, you thought you didn't need a digital camera? Wait, there's more . . . .

Create multimedia slide shows. The third software module is InMedia Presentation's Slides & Sound. After downloading images from the camera directly into the software, users can rearrange the order of the slides and add titles, captions, transitions or delays. They can also add sound to set their slide shows to music.

Digital postcards. Postcard software is not shipped with the camera but is available free from Kodak's Web site. It is intended to help unsophisticated users create, receive, view and save "digital postcards" that can be shared electronically via E-mail over the Internet. In operation, users access pictures directly from the camera (no need to download first) and drop them into electronic postcard templates to which they can then add text messages and the E-mail address of where the picture is to be delivered. One caveat-to view these postcards, the receiver must also be equipped with the Picture Postcard module. However, the software is free and operates on the Mac System 7.5 as well as Windows 95.

From the sublime to . . . . Finally, for more conventional uses, the camera is shipped with a TWAIN acquire module for Windows and a Adobe Photoshop plug-in for the Mac. Thus users accustomed to working with more sophisticated image-manipulation software can continue to do so.

Price and availability. The DC 20 will be sold through a wide network of resellers including camera dealers, catalogs and computer resellers. Its retail price is slightly less than $350; the product is already available in some stores.

In perspective. This camera sounds like fun, as are many of the consumer digital cameras. The quality may not be exceptional, and therefore not likely to see much use in commercial print publishing, but it should be adequate for home use, particularly in electronic publications, such as Web pages.

Inexpensive digital cameras are helping to bring digital photography to the consumer market. Once input, manipulation and output become inexpensive and easy for consumers to handle, applications will develop that take advantage of the technology to do useful things that are difficult, expensive or impossible to do in analog form.