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Comment of the Fortnight
14 Aug 1997
The New Digital Camera

I have bought a Kodak DC120 camera, and, as other people are doing, I have started a set of DC120 web pages.

This page may turn into "photos of the fortnight" rather than "comment of the fortnight," so stay tuned.

I have been very busy with my software projects, so I haven't had as much time to take pictures as I would like (business before pleasure) but here are some of...

The Pictures

All of these pictures were taken using the camera's "best" setting.

I was looking for anything to take a picture of once I got the camera out of the box; thus this picture of some of my refrigerator magnets :

[Refrigerator magnets]

It has been cropped and reduced in Photoshop, but has not had any other changes. Click on it for the full-size (117K) JPG version.

Jeffrey Glover says on his "Top Ten Ways to Tell If You Have a Sucky Home Page":

Despite his excellent advice, here's a picture of my cat, Tabitha, outside:

[Tabitha the Cat outside]

and inside:

[Tabitha the Cat on a chair]

Both of these images were cropped, reduced, and enhanced in Adobe Photoshop with the truly wonderful Intellihance plug-in

I also got a nice shot of the jade plant which David Chan nursed back to health, and which I am trying to keep alive.

[jade plant]

This image was cropped and reduced but not changed otherwise.

Using the Camera

I'm doing this page and the pictures on a Macintosh. When I first used Kodak's photoshop Plug-in I had only 16MB of real memory with virtual memory set to 40 MB.

It was horrible. It took about three minutes to transfer a picture at 1280 x 960 to Photoshop, and you could hear the disk drive beating itself to death all the while. I was incredibly frustrated and was beginning to wonder whether this camera was worth the trouble.

I went out today and bought 16MB of memory for $70 at T-Zone to boost the machine to 32MB of real memory. This is the best $70 I have ever spent. Now it takes only about 10 seconds to transfer the pictures. Roy Martin was right when he told me, "The cheapest way to add power to your computer is to add memory."

Now that I have the extra memory, I'm very pleased with the camera and look forward to using it for a project or two that I have in mind.

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