Kodak DCS Pro 14n

The viewfinder shows you only 92 percent of the actual scene, but its image size nearly equals that of the 35mm sensor, so manual focusing is easier than it is on a dSLR with a smaller sensor. The 2-inch LCD is quite sharp and clear even in daylight. Because the camera renders RAW pictures progressively, a slight delay occurs before they display completely, but then you can quickly zoom and scroll for close inspection.

The flash-synchronization speed of 1/125 of a second works fine in a studio, of course, but it will force you to use narrow apertures in many outdoor fill-flash situations. Only Nikon's DX-series shoe-mount flashes enable the 14n's through-the-lens (TTL) flash-exposure system; all others function in regular auto mode. There's also a built-in flash; its guide number of 39 feet at ISO 100 makes it useful for short distances and handy for fill-flash.

The 14n's images are unlike those of any competing dSLR. We shot studio and environmental portraits, products, and architecture at ISO 80, and the pictures showed superb detail with virtually no electronic noise. Curiously, we did encounter occasional luminance noise in certain midtones. Our files made beautiful 16x20 prints, and we expect they could go much larger. Compared with 35mm slides digitized on a 4,000dpi CCD scanner, our test images were at least as detailed and much smoother. Among current 35mm-style dSLRs, only the Canon EOS-1Ds can produce photos with a similar level of detail.

Unlike nearly all competing sensors, the 14n's CMOS chip lacks an expensive low-pass, or anti-aliasing, filter, which blurs fine detail but reduces moiré and color aliasing, an artifact resembling Christmas-tree lights that sprouted at the edges of highlights in many of our test shots. We removed the latter problem and the aforementioned luminance noise with a few minutes of fairly easy software processing. For us, the image editing was a tolerable inconvenience, but you may feel otherwise.

Results from the Portrait Look color setting are flat and lifeless, but Product Look produces pleasing skin tones and fairly accurate if somewhat muted colors, so we chose it for nearly all our test images. In the 14n's brief product life, Kodak has already tweaked the camera's color-reproduction software and firmware at least once, and further updates are inevitable. We used version 4.3.1 of the firmware and Photo Desk 3.1.

Microlenses boost light-gathering capability and facilitate better high-ISO performance. To cut costs, Kodak didn't put microlenses over the 14n's individual photosites, or pixels. As a result, noise quickly increases at ISO settings higher than 80, and images are quite noisy by ISO 400. Photo Desk's noise-reduction function can counteract the problem to some degree, but like nearly all such processing algorithms, it often produces a smeared, unrealistic look in some parts of a picture. Therefore, you can't cleanly enlarge higher-ISO photos nearly as much as ISO 80 shots. Excessive noise also imposes limitations on long exposures; we couldn't snap anything usable with a shutter speed longer than two seconds.

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