Kodak DCS520 / Canon D2000

Opinion: I owned one of these for a few months back in 2008. Mine was badged as a Canon D2000. I bought it second-hand for just over £100 complete with battery and charger - on a rational level it's not worth anything at all nowadays, but I was curious to see what it was like.

In general I was impressed. By modern standards the resolution is very low, but the files were sharp and detailed and would have been very impressive in 1999, or whenever the camera was new. The digital interface was quirky - you navigate a drop-down menu system using timed button presses and the rear command dial - and the camera's physical interface relies on the "hold button and turn dial" paradigm that was common with professional cameras at the time, but died out after a while. In order to change the ISO value, for example, you have to hold down the top-panel AF and metering button, and simultaneously twiddle the finger dial, which is impossible one-handed and tricky if you are holding the camera with the factory-supplied hand strap.

Although the screen is low-res, the histogram and highlight playback review are clear and easy to read, and is still a model of how to do it right. Canon adopted almost the same interface with the first Canon 1D, which was essentially a modernised DCS 520. The DCS 520's menu system and digital interface is fast and responsive, which surprised me for a camera so old. It takes a couple of seconds to start up, but beyond that you can shoot and review instantly. You can't zoom in, though.

Image quality was smooth up about ISO 640, beyond which the noise became progressively more horrible in a horrible blotchy way. The autofocus was very precise, the shutter and controls were immediately responsive, the burst rate is nothing special by modern standards (3.5fps, and I got 13 shots in a burst with a Compact Flash card) but the buffer empties quickly and the camera never felt slow. In common with the EOS-1n on which it is based, the DCS 520 has five large autofocus points spread in a line across the middle of the frame. It's a simple system but in practice I didn't have any problems with it.

It has a two megapixel sensor with a 1.5x cropping factor. No anti-aliasing filter, although I didn't have an issue with moire. The image quality was essentially the same as a modern digital SLR, but sized right down and a bit more plasticy. This was ultimately the reason I got rid of it. Once the novelty wore off I had a large, bulky, two megapixel camera with image quality much the same as a modern camera, but much smaller.

As other reviewers point out, the camera - and Kodak SLRs in general - seemed to be unusually good at recovering blown highlights. The camera's meter tended to be a bit "hot", overexposing slightly, but I could usually bring back any lost highlights.

Opinion: Vou avaliar esta câmera baseado no que se encontra hoje em dia no mercado
relativo à ela, ou seja, câmeras do mesmo nível, em particular a EOS 1D, e EOS 1D
MKII, porque analisá-la levando em conta suas concorrentes quando ela foi
lançada seria um massacre.

Apesar dos 2megapixels que ela oferece ao usuário, ainda é uma câmera
perfeitamente utilizavel para o fim ao qual ela foi projetada, o fotojornalismo.

Com as novas versões do Photoshop (do 7.0 para cima) é possível interpolar sua
imagem em até 4megapixels sem uma perda de qualidade considerável, levando em
conta que os jornais trabalham em 150dpi, podemos term ampliações de até 20cm
x 30cm com esta câmera. Seu CCD oferece excelentes cores e uma qualidade de
imagem muito boa.

Opinion: bought it for 500$ and I think its a good deal, the camera is allmost perfect, fast, the images are realy film like, made for crativety, after non professional cameras I realy found something new in the photography thanx to that camera, the only minuses are it's weight and size

Opinion: im photographing theater with the camera and those are dark situations and the cam has no problems what zo ever
but dont set the iso to high else there wil be noise in the pictures

Opinion: I bought this camera second hand a few months ago for $1000 on-line and I have not lifted my film camera since! Not only does it do everything I want it to but i can just send everything straight to the puter where it all ended up anyway. This particular camera also has an advantage over newer digital cameras in that it will take pcmcia cards so you can use any type of storage, not to mention removeable laptop hard drives which will allow you to store literally thousands of pictures, in the case of the toshiba 2gb card - 1100 for $90.

The camera itself is rock solid even with a high(ish) counter and i'm still exploring the never ending list of things it can do. I would thoroughly recommend this camera for anyone on a limited budget (students like me) who wants to go digital because for the price of a second hand EOS1, you can buy a digital version!

With the latest versions of Kodak's firmware and twain application the image editing is very simple although they usually need very little adjustment except maybe the white balance or exposure compensation.

This is an increadible camera and no mistake.

http://www.ianpetrie.co.uk

Opinion: This is a great camera. I bought mine (AP surplus) for
$1500 with all original accessories plus two batteries and
two memory cards. I shoot for a small daily newspaper and I
got fed up with how slow the D30 was to focus and shoot. I
lost a little image size, but I more than made up in camera
performance. Now I feel like a pro again, shooting the way I
like to shoot. The camera had 22,000 actuation on it when I
got it, and I've already put a thousand more on it in the last
week. Having a 1N based digital body with E-TTL is just
short of a miracle to me. This is a great, fast camera. Two
memory card slots? Available GPS functions? Direct
cell-modem transmission? Why didn't I buy one of these
sooner? Oh, yeah - they were $12,000.

Opinion: very good camer hope to hope to have bigger files with same speed

Opinion: Best camera in its class by a mile. I can use this in the studio
at the same speed as I would my normal EOS1n. I use the
camera tethered most times so the client can revue their
images. The DCS Plug in works a street in this situation.

Opinion: this camera is fantastic....and so hard wearing, in the studio, 20 000 shots in 2 months..no complaints from the camera...i have dropped it countless times, many people have used it, i have had it on the beach with me...brilliant