Design
The DC280 has a fairly standard compact camera look with some interesting styling choices (the "retro circles" used all over this camera give it a feely-feely look). Well placed pieces of hardened rubber are found on the hand grip, rear portion (right of the mode dial), connection and CF card covers, and the small finger grip on the front. The DC280 is very well put together, it feels solid and built like it's going to last. There are also some very nice control touches such as the front finger grip, LCD brightness control and CF card ejector lever (on the base).
Here's a shot of the camera in hand, most of the important controls are easily accessable, I found the hand grip to be a little awkwardly narrow (compared to Oly C2000z / Nikon 950) and thus have to pull my finger back to hover on the shutter release. You also really need to use two hands to hold the camera, but that's what that finger grip is for.
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On the base the tripod mount has enough base around it to be stable, however it isn't directly in line with the lens axis (bad for panoramas) and it's too close to the battery cover. With my Manfrotto quick-release tripod mount attached the batteries compartment wouldn't open fully. Not a big problem (at least the CF card compartment is on the side of the camera!). Spot the high quality pre-production "Made in Japan" sticker ;) |
Rear LCD Display
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The rear LCD on the DC280 is clear and bright,
surrounded by cursor buttons and the display By default the display is turned off. I'm glad to report that although the live preview is not yet up to the standards of other digicams it is MUCH improved on older Kodak cameras and refreshes at about 10fps. |
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Ok, hands up all Nikon owners who wish they had one of these.. Yep it's a brightness control for the LCD.. So now YOU can choose how bright you want the LCD and suffer the concequences in battery life (if you choose to). A long-time-coming feature which is very welcome. Kudos to Kodak. |
button which is used to turn the display on and
off and confirm menu options.Top LCD Display
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The Top LCD displays information about image quality, resolution, frames remaining, flash mode, macro / landscape focus modes, self-timer and battery status. |
Optical Viewfinder
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Normal enough viewfinder, located centrally on the back of the camera (less parallax errors), the two lights indicated: Top (green): focus lock / enough light. Bottom (red): camera not ready (internal buffer full). |
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This image represents the view through the viewfinder, the brackets represents the center of frame and the cameras auto-focus field, the lines near the edges indicate parallax-error "edges of frame" when taking macro shots. |
