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 ;)
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Rear LCD Display
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The rear LCD on the DC280 is clear and bright,
surrounded by cursor buttons and the display 
button which is used to turn the display on and
off and confirm menu options.
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.
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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.
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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. |
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