The new Kodak Professional

DCS 760 integrates the body, chip, and software quite well indeed.

The body is a modified 35mm Nikon F5 SLR with all the durability and most of the functions of the original, with a couple of exceptions. Naturally, there is no film drive or rewind motor, and the modified version will not work in through-the-lens (TTL) metering mode with Nikon’s dedicated electronic flashes. The flash that is designed for the DCS 760, Nikon’s SB-28DX, uses camera-to-subject information from the autofocus system to set the proper exposure. When you think about it, this is a far superior method than reading the flash bouncing off the film, as in the standard Nikon F5. What is important is how well Kodak has integrated their digital capture technology with Nikon’s F5 to build a wonderful professional digital camera.

The CCD

A bit smaller than 35mm film, the CCD imager sits in the plane where film would go in the 35mm Nikon F5, right behind the self- diagnostic titanium shutter. It captures a 36-bit, 2,008x3,032-pixel image that opens as a 17.4 megabyte TIFF file. The DCS 760 offers true wide-angle digital captures. The focal length multiplier is 1.3, so a 17mm lens on the DCS 760 equates to a 22mm on a full-frame film camera.

Portrait of a Maasai woman. Handheld, 1⁄250 second at f/3.5, ISO 200 (Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8 D AF-S lens).

There’s a removable infrared cutoff filter in front of the mirror, shutter, and CCD and before the lens that can be replaced with an optional anti-aliasing filter to help reduce color artifacts in the highlights. While there is some debate as to the loss of sharpness caused by the presence of another piece of glass between the lens and CCD, the reduction of dust on the imager is

worth any imperceptible degradation —because they’re electrically charged, CCDs are dust magnets.

I tested the Kodak Professional DCS 760 for three weeks on safari in Kenya. In the dry, high desert of eastern Africa, dust is a constant, especially shooting from the open- topped Land Cruisers we used on game drives. It was not unusual to return to camp covered in dust—I

could write on my forearm with a wet finger. Despite regular lens changes in these adverse conditions, the DCS 760 had no dust artifacts over the course of over 3800 exposures.

The only drawback to the filter is that the rear element of some Nikkor lenses extends far enough behind the back flange to damage the filter when they are mounted.

PEI • NOVEMBER 2001 • 43