Kodak DC120 Digital Camera

maybe it is because i am a tech-head, but i found the UI for the DC120 fairly intuitive. by default, all you do is point and shoot...by experiementation i was able to figure out what the other controls were--the manual, of course, was very helpful as well.

i am not sure what i'd do without one of these (and am lucky enough to have one through work--what will i do if i ever leave?!) to take loads upon loads of photos on my travels, store them on my hard drive, erase the cartridges, and load up for about 100 more (2 x 6meg carts)?

i am not a professional photographer by all means, but i do really like what i've seen w/ the DC120..

i have pictures available taken w/ the DC120: http://ill.beats.com/~jm/DaPix/Oct.11.week/index.html (things, friends, family)

http://ill.beats.com/~jm/DaPix/Nov.15.97.weekend/index.html (mostly my girlfriend)

this may demonstrate the quality of the camera--note that these are about .5 the size of the originals, and have been saved as jpeg at about 87% quality.

well, the place that i (used) to work bought two of these cameras for the specific task of electronically documenting projects either for archival or publishing. the subject was biological engineering for the university of pittsburgh; i was their webmaster, or rather, i was hired to make their site look nice and be easily navigable. or something. anyway, i could play with all the toys.

i can't say that, had the choice been mine, i would have gone with the same camera - i probably would have opted for the current (1997) canon, most likely because it actually looked like a camera, as opposed to the incredibly ugly DC120, and seems to have better lenses, if not better resolution.

however, i had to work with the DC120, and since i wasn't paying for it, i wasn't going to complain.

the good things: the image is bigger than the competition. however, it's color and dynamic range appear worse than that of a good video ccd. this makes sense given that smaller pixels capture color less accurately. so more, may, in this case, be less. the built in flash seems to as good as many point and shoots, but the dynamic range of the image is so shallow i tried to avoid using it. it has a zoom, which extends it's usefulness a little, given that you can't interchange any lenses (for $1000? believe it). the images were decently sharp with good lighting. the built-in picture display was excellent.

the bad things: the price. compared to the other offerings in this market area, you are paying a large premium for those extra pixels. as far as i am concerned, the design of the camera itself is ridiculous. it looks like a toy, unless you happen to know that it costs more than it's horizontal resolution. it eats batteries, four AA's at a time, even without flash. the download software looks late beta, if that. there is a huge delay between pressing the shutter release (which has a rather rubbery feel as do all the completely electronic controls) and the time that the shutter actually triggers, which made capturing action utterly impossible and often frustrating. the zoom is neither wide enough nor long enough. don't even think about low-light photography.

this camera is essentially fully automatic, except for shutter speed. this may or may not be a good thing, depending on who is using it.

really, it's hard to give kodak credit for anything here other than coming out with the first consumer mega-pixel camera. i guess i just hate the way it looks, at the price. it performs adequately ONLY in those areas that a digital camera is most useful - in low-bandwidth web publishing where speed is important, and in candid work where film and developing is too expensive compared to the infinite capacity and zero picture cost of digital.

publishing? other than newspaper, perhaps, forget it. art? not a chance.

this camera is, as far as i am concerned, a rich boy's toy. if you want digital, either spend more for a back, or less for a lower-res p&s.

My experience with the DC120 has been relatively good. I agree with a lot of the nuisances about no action pictures and the akwardness of the back panel. For quick pics with no film waste it does a pretty good job. I did not find much difficulty with the computer part of the operation, although at times it is very slow. It has been a worthwhile experience. I have some good shots to show for my effort. I like the fact that it is very easy to carry, not cumbersome. The horizontal shooting position takes some getting used to, but was comfortable. I still prefer my 35mm Minolta 9xi for shooting sports, but for the half time the DC120 works fine.

I bought this camera primarily to document the contents of my house for insurance purposes. However, I find that as a general point and shoot camera it's more than adequate.

The UI is not good for most people, but as a computer professional I found it adequate. I do NOT use the review screen, and hence I get reasonable battery life.

Rather than use the glacial picture transfer software, I purchased a separate Photo-card reader which attaches to my PC parallel port and appears as a removeable disk to Explorer. Thus, I can copy the image files rapidly to my hard disk. I then use the picture transfer app to convert these files to jpeg. A result of this is that I always use the card storage rather than the built-in memory.

I am a "housewife" not a photographer and my husband bought me a KodakDC120 for Christmas 1997 and I am really enjoying it. I am finding that close-up/portrait pictures come out alot better than "scenery" pictures, though. And also each photo softwear has it's own good points and bad points---I have several soft wear programs--- but what i like most about the camera is it is very easy to use and i don't think the downloading is confusing (I've only been working on a computer since Sept. 1997). I am able to make some very nice print outs and as far as action shots---I've got some great pictures of my kids jumping on a trampoline, does that count? Thanx--joanne gillen

Anyone want to buy a DC120 cheap? I agree that the images can be surprisingly good, and that the camera works well for shots of static objects. But that delay between the button press and shutter action is extremely frustrating, and I feel it makes the camera unusable in too many situations. I find portraits difficult at best-- the subject (especially children) often gets bored or irritated and turns away before the shutter opens. For now, I've gone back to my point-and-shoot film camera and scanner, a combination which I'd hoped to replace.

I use my DC120 mostly for photographing scenery, and I find it does a reasonable job at that. I chose the DC120 for its high resolution and its degree of manual control (virtually non-existent in most other consumer digital cameras I know of).

I think the pictures taken in sunlight look pretty good. Sunsets pics are possible, though lower light pictures may need a tripod. I like the exposure compensation controls and the close-up macro capability. I found the manual exposure controls useful, once I figured out the meaningful equivalents of the 10 or so manual shutter speed/aperture combinations. (email me if you want to know details)

The camera seems reasonably durable. I accidentally dropped the camera once from 4 feet up onto a plastic mat, and nothing was broken. That isn't much of a drop test, but at least it didn't break like a cheap toy. I carry it in my knapsack while cycling to work every day, and the vibrations haven't hurt it yet. Things that suck:

The battery life is really, really bad - my camera says alkaline AA's are dead when they drop to 1.45 volts. Nicads and rechargeable alkalines do not even work at all in my camera!

The user interface is terrible! Whoever designed it is a total, complete, utter idiot!!! And the buttons are hard to push - they are too small and there is little tactile feedback. You have to watch the display to see if the button actually got pushed. But the display lags behind the button push by a noticeable amount of time.

There is no lens cover! There are threads to screw on 37mm camcorder filters. I put on a clear filter to protect the lens.

I recently borrowed a DC120 from a friend to try it out. The pictures the camera produced were great (you'll find some of them on my pages at http://www.haruchai.demon.co.uk in the pics section) but I do have some complaints.

1. The camera uses vast quantities of batteries. For any serious work, a power supply would be essential. At times, I was getting only 15-20 pictures per 4 AA batteries. 2. After using the camera for a week, and then giving it back to my friend, he phoned to ask what I had done to it. It wasn't working anymore - just displaying a totally uninformative error message. The problem turned out to be that if the battery dies during a camera->computer data transfer, the firmware crashes and corrupts the entire camera memory. The solution to this is then to visit Kodaks web site and download new firmware which then has to be dumped into the camera. A bit of a pain.

Apart from this, I enjoyed using the camera although I'll wait until it is made a little more friendly before I buy one.

I purchased this camera for use as a real estate appraiser. I all ready had a Kodak DC50. The DC210 eats batteries like peanuts. Lithion Ion batteries last 2-3 weeks compared to 2-3 months in the DC50. Photos were fine for real estate though. I took the camera to my niece's wedding and went through absolute misery. There is a half second or so pause between the time I snapped the picture and the time the picture was recorded. Good images turned into bad pictures because of "What you get is what you anticipate". At my nephew's wedding, I'm going to take my 35mm camera and use a scanner. By the way, I use the DC50 in my real estate business. I can't afford to run out of batteries in Podunk, Georgia.

The only problem with having reviews of digital cameras like this is that for the moment, they're a lot like computers in terms of what is new and exciting today is tomorrow's old, outdated technology.

I doubt that this time next year you'd even see a DC120 anywhere for sale or in use. The Nikon Coolpix 900 seems to be the hot digital camera at this point in time. Of course, give that camera a year and it too will be old technology.

The DC120 was the second digital camera I ever used, better than the first (a QuickTake something) in ways, but it had some major drawbacks. When I first took the camera out, I did notice that the quality of the image was quite nice, and it did allow you to take uncompressed images (also has 3 levels of JPEG compression). But then the problem arose. The batteries died, so I didn't think much of it, I had borrowed to camera, so I went out and replaced it with 4 brand new Alkalines.(AA) It went fine and took pictures, off and on for a little less than an hour. Then it died, AGAIN! After this, I was very careful to turn it off when I was not using it, and conserve battery life, but yet again it died. In less than five hours of occasional use, the batteries had died three times. It was a digital camera, so I was willing to deal with it, until I went home and happened to test the batteries... Holding a solid 1.41 volts each they weren't enough to run the camera. It states on the camera that you can use NiCads, but based on the problems that I had with Alkalines, I wonder if it is true. The package states that it will work best with Lithium batteries, but I was unwilling to invest more money in batteries which very well might not do much better. An AC adaptor (RatShack $12), made the camera much more economical. Batteries aside, this camera did offer a one features which are not found on many(any?) digital cameras in that price range. One of which is the ability to choose the exposure time, selectable up to 8 seconds, which made for some cool night effects. Something that took some getting used to with this camera was the delay that the camera took before actually taking the picture after the shutter release was pressed, it was noticable to the point that I had to compensate by taking the picture about a second earlier than the action than I wanted in the picture. After the shutter went, it also took between 10-20 seconds for the camera to write the picture to the ram card. The final problem that I had with the camera was transfering pictures between the camera and my machine was incredibly slow (the sony floppy write proved much more convient). Overall, the camera has many features which other cameras lack in that price range, but the camera still has a long way to go. A nice camera if you will exploit the uncompressed images, but otherwise it would probably be better suited to get a DC50 or get one of the SONYs. (That has a nice easy GUI).

I used a DC-120 for about one year. The battery problem is best dealt with by not using the LCD to review shots and not using the serial cable to download pics. I used Rayovac Renew rechargable alkaline batteries, could get 60 pix and a download from one charge, for about 20 or so charges. The batteries are so cheap I had two sets, one in the charger and one in the camera. If going out in the field, I took both sets for insurance.

I really liked the IR autofocus, the depth of field was also good. The overall sharpness on pix with lots of "busyness" was low because of the CCD technology (interpolation and color) and jpeg artifacts. But for portraits or close-ups, the camera did very well.

I killed the camera by inadvertantly putting only one of the four batteries in backwards!!! Waiting for 2 months for repair resulted in a refurbished camera that did not work as well as the original (from Ritz Camera repair center... use KODAK!).

Aside from the "clarity" problem, I really liked the DC-120.

Now I have an Olympus D600L. This is an SLR with TTL auto-focus and -ezposure. This is one sharp camera, if you can get the optical autofocus to pick out the proper focus region or work at all in many low-light -contrast conditions. Some practice in working around this shortcoming yields great shots! The resolution is 1280x1024 with no interpolation.

Unfortunately there is no provision for adjustable manual focus. There are two fixed focus settings at 1.3 and 8.3 ft. So one cannot focus on the moon and take a shot. The DC120 would focus on an object in the dark, allowing flash shots in low/no light situations. The Oly will not focus at all if there is insufficient light.

Bottom line? I like the picture quality of the OLY much better than the Kodak. Paid only $850 on the web for the D600L.

One other problem with the Oly, the ISO rating is only 100 so motion while actuating the shutter release is a real problem. One must be very careful to hold the camera properly and release the shutter carefully, especially in low light.

If the Oly had the Kodak IR focus and manual shutter settings.... (8/28/98)

I've used mine for almost a year now and find it is wonderful to use. Being able to hold it with the strap and taking one handed shots is wonderful, especially while riding my motorcycle. Granted the pix are upside down, due to holding it left handed, but it works great! As for battery consumption, I use lithium AA's which last around 300-400 shots when the resolution is set at the 3rd level. (where I take most of my shots.) I did get an external power supply for uploading the pictures onto my desktop, but when it comes to the laptop, the pcmcia card is the best method for transfering images. With paint shop pro-5 it is a breeze as it will also do batch transfers from the kodak format to jpg. (much faster than the kodak software does.) The controls are difficult to use in a hurry, but I personally feel that my best images come from taking my time.

I had been using the Kodak DC-120 for about a year and a half when I replaced it recently with the DC-260. I really enjoyed my dc 120, it gave me many (5000+) great images and yes it burns batteries like birthday candles! I found the controls very serviceable after a fashion, and the long exposure was a blast! I do not care for the time delay in shutter response! I used the camera at work as a documentation camera in the lab with the addition of a macro lens set, this gave me wonderful close in shots. I found the cameras resolution fine for most work but, really appreciate the DC-260's 1536x1024 resolution! DO NOT use the serial cable for downloading the camera unless you have stock in a battery company OR you are really bored! Well, I could banter the differences all day and not help at all but, I will say that Kodak now sells the DC-120 on there factory outlet page for $399.00 refurbished! It is a great price for the camera to send with your college kid for pics or for a clunker / vacation expendable! Enjoy your camera and except the limits in its design! Or spend more money, Always shop carefully! Keep shooting!

After using this camera for over two years I am still very satisfed with it. It produces very good images and is quick an easy to use. It does eat batteries (turn off the review feature) BUT unlike most everyone else, I discovered that if you HALF depress the shutter button and hold it, it will focus and set the exposure and THEN it takes a picture very quickly after the final press of the button. I purchased the camera at auction for $300.00 and feel that I got not only an excellent deal but a pretty nifty camera too!

I too have used the DC120 for awhile in the course of my job. It takes great pictures for its age, but the interface is indeed "non-intuitive." The horizontal format is strange as well, but DigiCams are pushing the look and feel envelope all over the place, you know?

The battery problem is so bad, I almost gave it up. But then, someone turned me on to some NiMH rechargeable batteries, and wow! What a difference. I use 1600mAh Sanyo rechargeables, and can get easily 60 pictures WITH PREVIEW and download before recharging. They are amazing. So good, I now resell them They're also fantastic in electronic flash heads, (my first experience with them.) Once you try them, you never go back.