Digital Photography ten years ago
The
puppy blender links to a
fascinating look back into Digital Photography's history and the fun of using the new Kodak's NC2000
bq.
A look back at the NC2000
One night in the summer of 1999 Tony Kurdzuk was shooting a feature story on 24-hour diners. He and a writer, both working for the Newark Star-Ledger, drove a good percentage of the length of New Jersey, starting at midnight and finishing at 5:00am, dropping in on all-night eateries, Kurdzuk firing away at every stop.
bq. His camera was the "filmless" Associated Press/Kodak NC2000e, an improved version of the original NC2000, the "first electronic camera designed specifically for photojournalists" in the words of the AP.
A comment on using the new camera:
bq. Kurdzuk pauses for a moment, and then figures out how to sum it all up: "The NC2000, in general, was a practice in masochistic anxiety."
And more:
bq. But there was another side to the equation, he acknowledges. "It was a combination of excitement and anxiety. There was a lot of excitement about how cool this stuff was. You'd show up at an event, and you'd be the only guy with a digital camera, and everybody was ooohing and aaahing. That was always really cool. [But] I could never trust what the camera was doing. When you popped that card into the computer there was always that little thought in the back of your mind: what happened this time, what went wrong? But you kept doing it because it was so cool. And it was where the industry was going."
bq. "It was like the Wild West and panning for gold," remembers Nick Didlick. "It was wild and woolly." Didlick, then a staff photographer at the Vancouver Sun, first shot with an NC2000 in August 1994, just six months after the camera's announcement.
It was plagued with shutter problems (detailed in the full story) but there was also a design issue with the batteries:
bq. And then there were the batteries. "Yeah," says Gerry Magee, "that was one of the whoops's on it."
bq. Bob Deutsch, then and now a staff photographer for USA Today, puts it differently: "The first thing I said to them was, 'How do you change the battery?' And their comment was, 'What do you mean?' And I said, 'This is crazy. You can't produce a camera with a non-replaceable battery.' And they said, 'Well, it's too late.' And I said, 'Then why the hell are you showing it to me?'"
The article then goes on to talk about the cottage industry that grew up around this $13,000 camera -- Photoshop plugins to correct for the color, ways to work with flash, battery life (short).
There is also a wonderful gallery of images from this camera. Fun look back. I do a lot of photography with the Nikon D1X and love it. Used to shoot a lot of Kodachrome slides but for now, digital is the way to go. Still have my Nikon F-2 bodies but not using them...
Posted by DaveH at January 14, 2005 6:32 PM