Kodak DCS 14n: The Worm in Paradise

Let's have a look at the Kodak DCS 14n. Let's have a look at it for the second time. I've written about it before, back in 2017, but no. The weather was terrible and I don't think I did it justice.

So let's try again. Let's take this unloved blob somewhere nice. Let's give this fragile, twenty-year-old piece of electronic detritus the send-off it deserves, before it ends up in a cupboard surrounded by socks.

And so I visited Windmill Hill Business Park, in Swindon, Wiltshire. I've never been to Swindon before. I hoped that the ghost of Eugene Smith would feed me some of that Pittsburgh magic. But none of the photographs were any good so I went to Venice instead.

What is the 14n? It's a full-frame, fourteen megapixel digital SLR from 2003, notable for being the very first full-frame Nikon-compatible digital SLR, five years before the Nikon D3. It was one of Kodak's final stabs at the professional digital imaging market, at a time when the company still made a profit but was staring disaster in the face.

Was the 14n popular? Digital Photography Review's model was serial number 1224, presumably an early review sample, so my hunch is that serial numbers started at 1000. Mine is number 7054, which suggests that Kodak sold at least six thousand of them, and it's unlikely that mine is one of the last, so ten thousand? Twelve thousand? That's not bad for a $5,000 digital SLR from the medieval period. This website has serial numbers going up to the 16000s, but there's an odd jump between 9000 and 15000.

Sadly for Kodak the 14n was too little, too late, and after one final push in 2004 the company discontinued its pro digital cameras and then spent the next few years closing factories and laying off employees until it went bankrupt in 2012.

Imagine if J J Abrams had taken this direction for the Star Wars sequels

As of 2023 there are two Kodaks, both much smaller than the old Kodak, and occasionally the name is attached to other things in the same way as Atari and Polaroid, because a good name is hard to keep down. And there's the Eastman Chemical Company, which was spun off from Kodak in 1994 and is now an industrial giant, so at least a little bit of George Eastman's juice lives on.

A DCS 460 (1995), built on a Nikon F90s / N90s.

I'm not going to write an essay about Kodak. The company's first digital SLR was the Kodak DCS 100 of 1991. DCS stood for Digital Camera System. The DCS 100 was the first digital SLR that wasn't custom-made in tiny quantities for the US government. It was built around a Nikon F3, with an imaging system and shoulder-slung storage/playback unit of Kodak's creation. It wasn't very practical - the sensor was tiny, it had a huge crop factor - but throughout the rest of the 1990s Kodak refined the idea.

The early DCS cameras could, with a bit of work, be dismantled and turned back into film cameras. The later models were much more tightly integrated, but they still had film guides and winding motors.

The next-generation DCS models slimmed down the custom electronics into a cradle that attached to the back and bottom of a film SLR body supplied by Nikon or Canon, but mostly Nikon. The 14n itself uses a Nikon F80 body, and although the name implies there was going to be a Canon-bodied 14c, there never was, because by 2003 Canon did not need Kodak or anyone.

A considerably slicker DCS 760, built on a Nikon F5.

I've used a few of the DCS cameras. The DCS 400 cameras were kludgy, but the DCS 500, 600, and 700 were surprisingly good, or at least surprising normal. They introduced the APS-C and APS-H sensor formats that became standards over the next decade, and most of the basic interface elements of modern digital SLRs - the preview histogram, for example - first appeared in the DCS models.

But they came out in the proto-internet age, and they were obscure professional tools aimed at a specialised market, so they're still very obscure nowadays. On the used market they're in the awkward position of being rare and esoteric, but irreparable, with the early units dependent on software that ran on long-discontinued operating systems. And they're fundamentally meaningless. The value of an antique lies in its meaning, but what does a 1990s digital camera mean? They're like old DEC or Silicon Graphics computers. Fascinating, but hard to get working, and when you do, what then?

The DCS cameras have lots of generation-zero quirks. None of them had an anti-aliasing filter, and some of them even did away with an infrared blocker. The earliest cameras predated JPG, so they used Kodak's own image format, and until the second-generation cameras the photographer had to carry a laptop around to process the files into JPGs.

They all used batteries that resembled submachine gun magazines, which caused me a brief period of alarm as I took my 14n through the airport en route to Venice, because the batteries are really hard to find nowadays.

The original DCS models were aimed at the press photography market. The DCS 100-200-400-600-700 all used professional Nikon film camera bodies (the F3, F-80, F-90s, F5, and also the F5 respectively) whereas the DCS 1, 3, 5 and 500 were built around the Canon EOS 1n. The oddball DCS 300 cameras were built around some kind of Nikon Pronea APS SLR. The DCS 300 range was a bold attempt to capture the consumer digital SLR market, such as it was in 1998, but at a price of around $5,000 the DCS 315/330 were still not cheap.

I say "consumer market" - the press models retailed for $10,000+ and were really aimed at agencies rather than individuals, which explains the odd feature set. Press agencies often limit their cameras to ensure that the resulting images are of a consistent standard, and simultaneously they're really keen on accurate IPTC information.

Sadly for Kodak there was a spectre hanging over the press models. A sword of Damocles. A matte-black asteroid hurtling towards Kodak from the depths of space. A lethal virus locked away in permafrost just waiting to infect Kodak with a terrible and incurable sleeping sickness, prompting Kodak to create a self-perpetuating AI in the hope that some of humanity's essence might be preserved.

A tremble switch primed to go off by alien astronauts at the moment Kodak finally decoded the nine billion names of God. A set of bolts broken by a jolt during removal of the number one engine, just waiting to break when Kodak pushed the throttles to the take-off position. A faulty clasp in Kodak's money suitcase. Rain, on Kodak's wedding day. A free ride, but Kodak had already paid. A weak hinge in Kodak's only remaining pair of glasses. A translation error on Kodak's part whereby the company realised only too late that the message was Latin for "save yourselves" rather than "save me".

The problem is that it was only a matter of time until Nikon and Canon entered the press market themselves, as indeed they did at the turn of the millennium which is spelled two-two just like accommodate two-two. In response Kodak decided to shift to the wedding, portrait, and advertising market instead. The high-resolution, fine-art market.

Thus the 14n, which was sold alongside the DCS Pro Back, a square-format digital back compatible all the popular 645 systems of the period.

I don't often photograph trains. But I'm British, and trains loom large in the national consciousness. I grew up in a village that had a train station! But I never got to use it, because the station was closed before I was born. The Beeching Axe still makes people frumple today, sixty years later. Britain's railway infrastructure, particularly the tunnels, was built a long time ago, so it has issues that would not have arisen if we had waited a hundred years and copied the French.

I mention this because the Hitachi Rock in the photo above has three decks. Three decks! You enter on the lower deck, walk up into a mezzanine deck, then go up into the top deck.

Okay, technically it only has two decks - the lower deck is flat to the floor in between the bogies, then raises up to clear the machinery - but it feels like three decks.

But multi-deck trains won't work in the UK because the tunnels are too small and the tracks are too narrow. So our trains have one deck, just one. We were great once, but now we are a small people, with small trains. Small trains for a small people. We can be great again, but not with these tracks. Not with these tracks.

Not with these tracks. The DCS cameras had sensors designed and manufactured by Kodak, but the 14n was unusual in the the sensor was outsourced to a long-defunct company called FillFactory (which was eventually sold to Cypress Semiconductor in 2004, which in turn was bought by Infineon in 2020; whatever remains of the imaging sensor division now appears to make sensors for self-driving cars). The sensor is really the 14n's big problem. Or perhaps the electronics surrounding the sensor. I'm not an engineer. All of its other problems are number two, or lower.

That was a Mystery Men reference, by the way. It was a comedy superhero film from 1999. The same year as Galaxy Quest, but it was much less popular. It was a quarter of a century ago, let's move on.

A 14n alongside a Canon EOS 1Ds, which has an eleven megapixel full-frame sensor. I have a soft spot for Kodak, but the 1Ds feels a generation newer.

Medium format digital people have a fetish for vintage medium format backs with large sensors and small megapixel counts - "fat pixels", they call them - but none of the early full-frame digital SLRs were particularly good by modern standards, despite their modest pixel count. I have the impression that it was hard to squash a reliable sensor and its supporting electronics into a handheld camera in such a way that it didn't overheat or use too much power or get too noisy.

The first generation of full-frame digital SLRs were built around a sensor made by Philips, but the company had trouble making the chip reliably in sufficient quantities to bring the price down, so the only camera that actually went on sale - the Contax N Digital - was very expensive and only remained on the market for a year or so. The few reviews on the internet suggest that even at ISO 25 the N Digital was noisy in the shadows.

At ISO 800 the 14n automatically reduces the resolution to six megapixels.

The results don't look too bad at internet resolution, but up-close the image is covered in streaky chroma noise.

The 14n has essentially the same problem. Even at ISO 80 it doesn't cope well with dark shadows. The camera tries to compensate by applying noise reduction all the time, which has the side-effect of smearing away fine detail. Photoshop will process the files without noise reduction, but they're still a little bit grainy, which makes it difficult to sharpen the images in order to bring out detail. And it's not especially good-looking grain, because it has a pattern.

Perhaps because of the sensor's poor light sensitivity the resulting images have an oddly flat, slightly purplish colour tone. That can easily be tweaked with Photoshop, though, so I'm not going to comment on the colours too much. Throughout this article I essentially boosted the contrast and made the white balance less purple but left the images mostly untouched. Even with boosted contrast the colours are muted, but not unpleasant.

The sensor has another issue, particularly relevant for for product or landscape photographers. The Canon EOS 1Ds had no problem with lengthy, multi-minute exposures (Digital Photography Review took a fifteen-minute exposure with no ill effects). In contrast the 14n's imaging pathway seems to break down beyond ten seconds or so.

In the following image there's a ten-second f/4 exposure at the top, which is fine - although the glow around the lights looks very artificial - and a twenty-second f/5.6 exposure at the bottom, which should look more or less the same, but obviously something went wrong:

The 14n seems to have aggressively raised the black point in order to mask the shadow noise, but the results look awful. The camera takes a second image after the first, a dark frame, and subtracts it from the original, but the dark frame is presumably so noisy that it doesn't work.

The 14n has a dedicated long-duration exposure mode, but it works by stacking a bunch of images on top of each other, and it only supports a narrow range of exposure values - thirty seconds, but only at an equivalent of ISO 6 - so it isn't as useful as it appears. For the record a thirty-second exposure at ISO 80 without dark frame subtraction with the lens cap on looks like this:

The 14n attracted mixed reviews at the time, although as with Fujifilm's S3 and S5 Pro it's a better camera now than it was when new, because the software has caught up. In particular modern noise reduction algorithms are better than the noise reduction in Kodak's DCS Photo Desk.

For a lark I tried using Photo Desk with an old Windows XP laptop (it crashes in Windows 10) but it was slow and awkward.

The image with a little E next to it was shot with Kodak's JPG-ERI format, for Extended Range Information. JPG-ERI was a quasi-RAW format that preserved the extra headroom and colour information of the 14n's RAW files, but it only worked with a Photoshop file format input module that I don't have and can't find, so I can't test it out. Luckily JPG-ERI files are still open-able as standard JPGs.

The 14n benefits from shooting RAW, which is a lot easier now that a 1gb CompactFlash card no longer costs £150. The 14n's .DCR RAW files have a bit of extra highlight information, and they're the only way to get results that don't have noise reduction, albeit that you have to use Photoshop or something similar to do this. Kodak PhotoDesk still applies a little bit of noise reduction even if the menu option is set to "none".

Photoshop CS4 (top) vs Kodak Photo Desk (bottom). Things to note include the obviously different colour balance, particularly the reds, and the moiré pattern in the railing. But also Photo Desk's noise reduction, which gives the image - particularly the foliage - a smeary, video-camera look.

On paper the 14n had a lot going for it. At a list price of around $5,000 it was $3,000 cheaper than the Canon EOS 1Ds, much much cheaper than a 20+ megapixel medium format back from Phase One or Sinar etc. If you were a fan of Nikon the 14n was, as mentioned, the only Nikon-compatible full-frame digital SLR until the Nikon D3 of 2007.

The 14n came with an extensive suite of software, at a time when Nikon still charged money for the Nikon Capture RAW development tool, and it had a bunch of clever technical features, some of which are still unusual nowadays, including a timelapse intervalometer, flexible dual card slots, GPS connectivity, a built-in microphone for voice memos, a 1:1 zoom with luminometer, and a second display that shows a bunch of parameters in quick-look format.

The 14n has dual card slots, CompactFlash at the top and MultiMediaCard at the bottom. MMC is pin-compatible with SD, so you can use a 2gb SD card instead.

The rest of the 14n's problems are relatively minor. The camera takes several seconds to start up and several seconds to switch ISO, during which it displays a "calibrating" message on the little screen. It takes a while to write files to the cards, although thankfully it finishes writing everything even after you turn the camera off. This might have been an issue if you were shooting a wedding back in the day, but as a casual photographer I didn't find it an issue.

The Nikon F-80 body lets the side down a bit. The F-80 was a popular chassis for digital conversion. The Nikon D100 was built around it, as were FujiFilm's S2 and S3 Pro models:

Conceptually the S3 is very similar, but it's a couple of years newer and has a smaller sensor, which might explain why it looks less kludgy.

The F-80 was launched at a time when Nikon was really enthusiastic about autofocus, so it doesn't meter with AI or AI-S lenses. The PSAM dial wobbles and feels as if it's going to fall off. The shutter makes a weak-sounding SCHLUH-SHUNK noise. That's right, SCHLUH-SHUNK. The body itself feels like a piece of hollow plastic. In contrast the EOS-1Ds is like a solid metal brick.

There's a built-in flash, which I have never used, although it might be useful if I find myself lost in the jungle at night and need to signal a passing aircraft or fend off an attacking crocodile.

Why does Fujifilm still exist, whereas Kodak... also still exists, but not as much? Why does Fuji exist more than Kodak? There was a time when Kodak sold loads of digital cameras, albeit that they were cheap point-and-shoots aimed at the low-end consumer market. In 2005 it even beat Sony. But it was a low-margin, high-volume market, and in the long run Casio and Panasonic et al were better at that kind of thing than Kodak.

And none of Kodak's consumer cameras stood out. Websites never wrote about them. Fuji always tried to make its point-and-shoots interesting. There was the low-noise F30, the superzoom bridge cameras, the latter-day quasi-rangefinders, the underwater cameras. Sony and Canon stood for quality and competence. Casio was cheap but high-tech. Olympus was slightly posh and slightly odd.

But Kodak didn't seem to stand for anything. It was the kind of camera your uncle bought because it was a Kodak. The kind of camera that might be sold in a petrol station. They were marketed at your parents, not hip young things such as yourself. My hunch is that although the imaging side of Fuji is only a small part of its business, it survived because the cameras meant something, or were adjacent to other Fuji cameras that meant something, whereas Kodak's digital cameras did not have meaning, and Kodak itself felt slightly fusty.

I can only remember a single one of Kodak's point and shoots. The twin-lens EasyShare V570 of 2008, and even then I had to look up the name. It had two lenses, a fixed wideangle and a small zoom, housed in a cute rectangular body. It was an interesting idea that looked chic. Imagine if Kodak had done more with the idea, or released a range of really interesting little digital cameras, perhaps something with a fixed and unusually fast lens, or something that had a square sensor, or something, or anything that stood out.

What did Kodak do? What did Kodak mean? What did it mean? It was cheap and cheerful but also fuddy-duddy and old-fashioned. I don't know what it meant.

But enough about Kodak. What's it like to use the 14n nowadays? One major problem is power. If you don't have power you'll spend your whole life as a victim. A plaything of other people. You'll be pushed aside, evicted, told to sleep on a bench, told to wait for the bus, not given a seat, made to hang around, overlooked, out of the loop, not part of the conversation. Your life will no longer have meaning. People will not ask for your opinion, and if you offer it they will ignore you because you are not real. If you do not have power you are not real. You'll become a background figure in other people's lives.

You need power, and that means money, but it can also mean fear, although it's a lot easier to get away with the latter if you have the former, let me tell you. Do you remember the little monologue in Casino about digging graves in the desert? For that you need a car, a shovel, and isolation, and that costs money. Isolation is a lot harder here in the UK. There's very little countryside and everywhere is covered in CCTV.

I suggest you buy a van, with a covered rear. An anonymous van. And some tarpaulin, and a wheelbarrow. I use Google Street View to scout out potential locations. You can scroll back and forth through the years; try to find somewhere that hasn't been disturbed for some time. Overgrown verges, the spaces around railway tracks, but not too close to the track. Boggy, muddy areas where it's unlikely anyone will build a house.

Obviously you're going to have to explain why you're away from home for so long at night. But do you have to? "I went out for a drive". Why did you go out for a drive? "I just went out for a drive". That's enough.

The criminal burden of proof is beyond the shadow of a doubt. Power is...

No, I'm joking. I mean electrical power. One major problem is power. Electrical power. The 14n uses stick batteries. They're not particularly big or heavy, but Kodak stopped making them twenty years ago. There was a wave of third-party batteries from China, but they went out of production as well, and as of 2023 the batteries are hard to come by.

To make things worse, if you leave a battery in the camera it eventually drains away, at which point the charger refuses to charge it any more, so you have to train yourself to carry the batteries outside the camera. The 14n also uses a separate CR2032 to store the date, but that's not an issue because CR2032s are still widely available.

Is that George Michael? In the boat. With the sunglasses. Why would a normal person be wearing sunglasses in Venice at this time of year? The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. If subsequent revisions of this article no longer have that photo, you will know the truth. I'm perfectly happy to withdraw it if George Michael wishes. But wouldn't that just confirm that it really is George Michael? He wasn't stupid. Let's see what happens.

The power issue is why I still use my Fuji S3 every so often. It's why I took my Fuji S3 to Greenland. Because it uses standard AA batteries. If you ever get a 14n, or the related DCS Pro SLR/c or SLR/n, make sure that it comes with (a) the charger (b) some batteries (c) preferably the dummy battery, which has a socket for a mains power adapter. Any generic power adapter with the right socket will work.

With power out of the way the other problem is the slow sensor, so it helps a lot if you have some decent fast lenses, preferably autofocus, so you really have to be wedded to the Nikon system. ISO 200 isn't too bad for internet-sized images. Photoshop's noise reduction filter does a much better job at taming the ugliest aspects of noise than Kodak's original noise reduction algorithms. I can live with grain, but chroma noise looks nasty.

The fourteen megapixel resolution was big news in 2003 but is irrelevant nowadays. In television terms it's slightly lower than 5K. The camera isn't keen on memory cards larger than 2gb - sometimes they work, sometimes they don't - so I tried shooting JPGs for a while, which was painless. Once you get used to the smeary noise reduction, which admittedly is only an issue if you zoom right in, the JPG engine does a good job. The 14n is not a sports camera, but I did get off a burst as these people hove into view:

The 14n's BEST JPG setting is ludicrous - quality level 12, the highest level Photoshop supports - so my hunch is that you would lose almost nothing by setting it to BETTER.

I also did some cough reportage cough at the Lido, which in November was akin to Death in Venice minus the stylish melancholy.

There are options to shoot at a resolution of six megapixels, and to crop the JPGs square, or to 5:4, which is nice to have, although the viewfinder doesn't have a mask, so if you do that you'll be shooting blind.

Obviously the image below has been sized right down from six megapixels, but as Digital Photography Review points out the 14n's six-megapixel images are sharper and clearer than images from a contemporary six-megapixel camera - they benefit from downsampling - so if this was 2003 and you had access to only the most basic of editing tools you would have lost very little by shooting mid-quality six megapixel JPEGs. One limitation is that the camera can't zoom in on JPEGs, only RAW files.

This being a camera from 2003 the 14n doesn't have live view. The sensor cleaning mode flips up the mirror and opens the shutter, but you have to actually clean the shutter yourself. The 14n has a lens optimisation feature that supports a few Nikon lenses, but not for distortion or chromatic aberration, it exists only to ensure that the sky doesn't have a colour cast.

There's a composite video output port, which requires a special cable, but it only lets you play back images on a television. There's no video mode. The rear of the camera has a slot for a Fuji S2/S3-style plastic screen guard, but as far as I can tell Kodak didn't make one.

At launch the 14n had a 256mb buffer, which could be upgraded by Kodak to 512mb. As far as I can tell the only way to determine whether your camera has the upgraded memory is to fire off a burst and see how many images you get. I have the original 256mb.

About a year later Kodak essentially relaunched the camera as the DCS Pro SLR/n, which had a new sensor and new electronics in the same body. Judging by the reviews the SLR/n was a stop less noisy. To their credit Kodak also offered an upgrade service for the original 14n, replacing the original sensor and electronics with the SLR/n's internals, at which point the camera became the DCS 14nx.

Kodak also introduced a Canon-compatible model, the SLR/c, which was built around a body supplied by Sigma, with the internals of the SLR/n. It had a reverse-engineered Canon lens mount and E-TTL system, because presumably by 2004 Canon was so done with Kodak.

The SLR/c and SLR/n were discontinued in 2005. That was the end of the DCS range. Kodak continued to make sensors for Leica and Olympus - the company was part of the original Four-Thirds group - but in 2011 Kodak sold the sensor business, and a couple of years later it bowed out of the digital camera market. As of 2023 there are still Kodak digital cameras, but as far as I can tell they're made by other companies that licence the Kodak name.

What's the 14n like? I'm putting this off, because once you get used to the ponderous startup time and "calibrating" whenever you change ISO it's more or less like any other digital SLR. The output is, as mentioned, desaturated and slightly purply, but Photoshop fixes that easily. The lack of an anti-aliasing filter is only apparent with distant shots of cranes, fences etc, although it does mean that vertical and horizontal elements look strangely computer game-y. Photoshop does a good job at taming moiré noise without sacrificing detail.

Shadow noise is tolerable at ISO 200, although ISO 400 is a stretch. The shot above, of the boat, was taken at ISO 400, and there's a mass of noise in the bridge in the background, but I could probably have masked it by boosting the contrast and bringing up the black level.

Incidentally all of the images were shot with a Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8, which I'll write about separately. I have a bunch of Nikon lenses, but they're either older manual focus designs, or newer manual focus designs from the likes of Samyang et al, and as mentioned the 14n doesn't meter with non-electronic lenses.

If you want to shoot full-frame with a Nikon body the next-cheapest option is a second-hand Nikon D700, which is a lot more expensive but admittedly a lot more competent. Ultimately the battery issue makes the 14n an eccentric choice - I would hesitate to use it for anything serious for that reason alone - and in the long run the camera is doomed because of it, albeit that we are all doomed.

Is Venice doomed? I'll write about Venice separately. It's a fascinating place. The only medieval city-state to survive almost entirely intact - political system, infrastructure, language and all - into the modern age, albeit that 1797 is right at the start of the modern age. That's when Napoleon held up his hand and said "enough". But a Venetian born in 1796, holding a Venetian passport, could have had children that lived to see the twentieth century.

It's like Hong Kong, stretched over a longer period of time. It grew and flourished and faded over the course of centuries rather than decades. And it's old-school, in the sense that it actually had naval power at one point. An unlikely empire that wasn't an empire, built in a precarious location. It survived, and it continues to survive, because you'd have to be pretty angry to dislike Venice. And it still has money.

Venice has a slightly naff air. Like Monaco, but less in-your-face. Despite the presence of a university it's not a chic university town, perhaps because it's a maritime university. Not a bohemian, arty university. It's a university for sensible kids who want to pilot ships. Not the kind of students who are likely to dress up as giant cardboard vaginas or threaten to go on strike. At the same time Venice is one of the few mass tourist destinations that isn't completely naff. It attracts a certain amount of opprobrium from hipsters, because posh rich people are willing to spend money to save Venice and the Notre Dame etc but they don't give a stuff about the entire rest of the world what's up with that.

And yet the biggest existential threat to Venice is the rising sea, so assuming the world's billionaires don't just build a huge wall around it perhaps some good will come of their money. But that is another story for another time.