Currently I shoot with EOS-1D and EOS-1Ds bodies, and certainly they are a major advance over the older DCS 520 cameras. The EOS D30 was good for what it was at the time, but really couldn't match the DCS 520 for build quality, autofocus, and file handling. Most importantly, the DCS 520 was a real EOS-1N body, with a full 3 frames per second and that excellent, super accurate predictive autofocus. The DCS 520 used Kodak's excellent PhotoDesk software, while the EOS D30 had Canon's amateur-oriented Zoom Browser. The DCS 520 had a great FireWire tethered mode, while the EOS D30 supported only dog-slow USB. My first few months with the EOS D30 made me miss the DCS 520 worse than I thought. With a bigger sensor, the ability to shoot JPEGs right in the camera and handle smaller CompactFlash cards, the EOS D30 seemed like a much more mature product. ![]() When I sold off the DCS 520 in early 2001, I got just enough dough back to buy a spanking new Canon EOS D30 body. Over the course of about two years I banged out well over 100,000 shots on the DCS 520, eventually replacing it with a series of newer and better Canon digital SLRs. A few months later I managed to work a deal on a "demo" DCS 520 from a Boston camera shop, and $11,000 lighter I headed home with my new toy. I was head over heels in love with this thing, and the 2-megapixel file size seemed just enough for a lot of the catalog jobs that I was shooting at the time. I had just spent about two hours playing with one at the Kodak booth at the big PMA show, fighting off other interested parties while I marveled at the DCS 520's speed, incredibly bright LCD, and deep, deep menu and custom functions. My involvement with the DCS 520 started in early '99. Ouch!Ĭanon picked up Kodak's technology and carried on, making the back panels and menu systems surprisingly similar on the D2000 and EOS-1D. Certainly the 2 megapixel was plenty for newspaper work, and the big 6-megapixel sensor on the big brother DCS 560/D6000 would set one back $30,000. At a retail price of around $15,000, it was considered a reasonable investment by most daily newspapers, event imaging companies, and commercial photography studios. Yep, the D2000/DCS 520 was the first pro camera with an instant review LCD, and it is the camera that invented "chimping"-the act of constantly reviewing what you just shot, rather than looking in front of you at what you're about to shoot. ![]() ![]() ![]() The twins were based upon the defacto pro camera of the day, the Canon EOS-1N, and offered a big (for '98) file, 1728x 1152 pixels-a whopping 2.0 megapixels! For photographers using older DCS 420, DCS 410, and DCS 200 cameras, everything about the DCS 520 was revolutionary-especially the big LCD on the back! In an interesting joint marketing experiment, Canon released the camera as the D2000 with Canon badging, while Kodak rolled it out as the DCS 520, badged a Kodak but with the Canon logo clearly visible. A joint venture between Japanese camera maker Canon and American film giant Kodak, the camera hit the marketplace like wildfire. For it was in '98 that the first really good, really usable, really portable digital SLR camera hit the shelves. Without a doubt, 1998 was an important year for the digital camera industry. The D2000 sits next to its replacement, the EOS-1D (left).
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