Kodak DCS 560 - Retro Review
This twenty-seven-year-old digital monster, by Kodak, cost over fifty-five thousand US dollars on launch (adjusted for inflation). Built around a top-of-the-line Canon film SLR, these early electronic hybrid Franken-cameras are a fascinating piece of digital history. This is the second time that I've been lucky enough to find one of these in good condition, but could I get it working this time?
Kodak DCS 560 & EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens
(Taken with: Sony A1 + Samyang 135mm f/1.8)
Key Specifiations
Date:
$ (inflation):
Sensor:
Resolution:
Burst:
DR Stops:
Sync:
SS:
AF points:
Video:
Live-View:
ISO:
OVF:
LCD:
Memory:
Weight:
Battery:
1998 (July)
$28,500 ($55,700)
APS-H (1.3x) CCD
6mp
1fps / 4 RAW
7.7 (12bit)
1/250th
30s - 1/8,000th
5 (5%)
No
No
80 - 200
0.83x / 97%
2.0" / 1xxk / Fixed
PCMCIA (x2)
1771g
?? (Kodak NiCAD)
History
Steve Sasson invented the first digital camera in 1975, working for Kodak. A 100x100 pixel B&W sensor that stored images on to a cassette tape. In 1991 (after a few prototypes) Kodak entered the consumer market with the DCS 100; A Nikon F3, unofficially bolted onto a 1.3 megapixel APS-C sensor and connected to a large (briefcase sized) processing unit. Priced at $30,000, they had little competition early on, but after a decade or so they started to suffer.
Although Kodak's management were smart to diversify with digital photography, their R&D budget was dwarfed by Nikon, Canon and Fuji by the late 90's. Only one year after the release of the DCS 560, Nikon would bring out their D1. A smaller, lighter and considerably cheaper purpose built DSLR ($5,500)! Although it was smaller sensor (APS-C) with only 2.7 megapixels, the D1x, Canon 1D and full frame 1Ds were not far behind. By using Nikon & Canon lens mounts, Kodak made it too easy for their users to switch to the competition once they evolved... and evolve they most certainly did.
Build
The Kodak DCS 560 was built on top of the Canon EOS-1N. A professional Canon film camera that was released four years earlier (1994). Although the 1N was moderately weather sealed, Kodak's electronics were certainly not. This camera was also sold as the Canon D6000 (Japan only), which used a different firmware. I have never been a fan of Canon's button logic, and the on/off switch here is especially nonsensical. The elements added by Kodak are actually surprisingly clean (better than the DCS 760, from three years later). Apart from the relatively high-end camera body and a large, high resolution sensor, this was the first digital camera to have a screen, which went some way to justifying its callosal sticker price (you can almost buy fourteen Canon R5 mkII's for that today!). The sheer weight of this thing rather requires that signature Kodak hand grip, which I don't like, but I will leave in place for nostalgic reasons.
Condition
These cameras are pretty rare today, especially in good condition like this one, and even more so if they are still working. This DCS 560 is in better condition than my DCS 760 was, as that has some paint wear on the bottom around the door (see below). The above image shows the DCS 560 that I bought in 2025. The plastic port cover on the side of the camera came off, as the material had got rather brittle. The front port cover should be quite easy to replace. The rubber eye cup (EC-II) was in bad condition, so I removed it, but the official ones are still sold, so I have one on order.
When I bought this camera on an auction, it was described as maybe working, but with no guarantees. I assumed the worst, but had a glimmer of hope that it might be possible to get it working again. The previous owner of the camera told me that the camera display just flickered when a battery (that seemed to be charged) was inserted, but it would not stay on. He may have bought the camera purely to put on display, as he wasn't too familiar with the memory card situation. Perhaps he also didn't know how to turn the camera on. In his defence, it confused me for a while, too. This Canon on/off switch is not obvious at all.
When I got the camera home and after discovering where the insanely labelled (and positioned) power button was, I inserted one of the charged batteries that I still had and turned the camera on. Sure enough, the internal battery was dead, meaning you're greeted with the date/time warning message (more about that later). The camera doesn't need the date set to function, but I would like it to be correct without a battery being inserted. You shouldn't leave the batteries inserted in these cameras, as they will get depleted and become unchargeable. The internal batteries are not easily changeable either as they are welded to the motherboard. However, you can charge them somewhat with the DC charger. The previous owner didn't have this, but fortunately I had one from my DCS 760 kit, which is the same. Leaving it plugged in overnight seemed to fix that situation.
With the camera now working, and a fully formatted memory card inserted, I decided to go out and try to take some photos...
Canon EF 85L | f/1.2 | 1/640th | iso 200
Image Quality
This early six megapixel APS-H (1.3x) CCD sensor really needs direct sunlight to perform reasonably well, which I didn't have for the above shot. It's noticeably less detailed than the sensor in the DCS 760 (same size and resolution). This one suffers from poor noise, dynamic range, colour reproduction and bokeh. It is said to be a nice improvement over the Kodak DCS 460's image quality (same size and resolution), from 1995, although I cannot confirm that. The contrast and saturation from the DCS 560 appears quite weak straight out of the camera. Although some of that could be the raw processing. If you scroll down to the third image sample, you'll see that I tried making a colour profile using the Calibrite chart and DNG Profile Editor.
To help the camera out with light (and because I like bokeh), I decided to use Canon's superfast 85mm portrait lens. Unfortunately, there are major issues with the out-of-focus rendering when using one of the internal filters (IR / AA), which I didn't see when using this lens on a Canon camera. I also didn't see this with fast Nikkor lenses on the DCS 760, so perhaps this is also due to the Canon's short flange distance. The clipped bokeh shape is more obviously in the corners, but it affects the whole frame, making the image feel very busy and distracting (noticeable above, and even more so below), almost like you're looking through a mesh. The calibrated mage (below) and the very last photo of a squirrel were taken with the filter removed.
The Kodak 5xx series DSLRs can only shoot RAW format (TIF). Although the DCS 520 can batch process them to JPG internally, the higher resolution DCS 560 cannot (perhaps due to the higher resolution). Despite TIF files being a generic format (Adobe .DNG use the TIF format), Kodak made these TIF files proprietary. This meant that you could not open them in Photoshop without a plugin for many years. Amazingly, these files are now natively supported in Adobe software, so dragging one of these TIF files into Photoshop opens Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) like any other raw file. The files also preview perfectly in my image editor of choice - FastStone.
Higher ISO images (like the one above) will show vertical banding, which makes me wish for better de-noising. I tried the AI option in Adobe Camera Raw, but the results didn't look faithful (too painterly). Thus, none of the images you see here are de-noised in any way. Unfortunately, these raw files are not supported in DxO pureRAW, which is a real shame because it does a fantastic job with the six megapixel files from the Nikon D100. I put in a requested for DxO to add support for the DCS 560 & 760, but these are such niche cameras that I'm not going to hold my breath.
Canon EF 85L | f/1.2 | 1/6400th | iso 80
Autofocus
The focusing here is rather slow and extremely unreliable. It was difficult enough to get a hundred images from these batteries, but out of those, 95% of them were out of focus. Some of that was because optical viewfinders suck beyond belief for low angle shots like this, but the majority was the speed and ability of the focus system. On several occasions, I felt like the image was focused when looking in the viewfinder, but it was out of focus when reviewing the image. Often I would ask for the camera to refocus by half pressing the shutter button again, but it would refuse to try, like it was saying it seemed good enough when I could tell it had drifted off and needed sanity checking.
Internal Filter
This next photo was taken with the internal filter removed. Considering the colours are not much different here, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was just an Anti-Aliasing filter and not an IR one. The images do look a bit sharper and the colours don't look much different. Speaking of the colours, I took this opportunity to calibrate a colour profile (using a colour chart in DNG Profile Editor) with a Calibrite colour chart. This also shows the difference between the base Adobe colour profile and one that I calibrated. You can download the profile I made here. There is another squirrel photo taken with the filter removed at the very end of this review, to better show the bokeh rendering, but I will try to get better samples and update this review with more info about this.
Canon EF 85L | f/1.2 | 1/250th | iso 80
Screens & Menus
I wasn't expecting very much from 1998 camera menus and boy, was it a good idea to keep my expectations low, with one exception, which I'll come back to in a minute. Accessing the menu options involved holding down either the menu or select button, waiting for the options to pop up, scrolling the thumb wheel and then letting go activate that option, which will present a sub-menu, and you can then change the settings in that sub-menu by "click-hold-scrolling & letting go to activate" (it's even more awkward than it sounds). I don't know who came up with this monstrously bad way of interacting with the menus, but it's difficult to get used to.
If you read my review of the Kodak DCS 760, you'll see that the date on these cameras can only be set between 1990 and 2020. Being further in the future than Kodak ever thought possible feels rather obscure. Now, there is a slight workaround for this. If the camera's internal battery is depleted (you can't easily get to this battery to replace it, btw), then the date resets to an obscure 2101. If you manage to scroll the correct way, you can go backwards from here to set the date correctly. Now if you remove the battery it will reset this again, but if you have the 3-pin DIN DC power brick for running the camera from the mains, you can leave it plugged in overnight to somewhat recharge the internal battery.
By far the most interesting thing in the menus is that you can play pong using the thumb-wheel. I will try to make a video of this working, to prove that it's real. I see that someone did post a video of it on YouTube once, but it was removed over a decade ago. Since there may not be too many of these cameras around still working, it's my duty to make a nice new video of this.
Lenses
Canon EF lenses are probably the most common ones around and as people transition to mirrorless cameras the prices will continue to come down. I would NOT recommend using any Canon EF-S crop lenses, since this is not only a full frame Canon, but it also has a filter in front of that large mirror. EF-S lenses may only cover the 1.6x crop area, which is smaller than this sensor captures anyway, so don't risk damaging this rare system.
Using the awesome EF 85L lens is amazing, but if you want to use shallow depth of field lenses like this, I highly recommend removing the internal filter to unlock the true rendering quality in the out of focus areas. This camera and lens weigh nearly 3KG (6.2 lbs) with the battery. That's a rather shocking amount today, when f/1.4 mirrorless combinations can weigh as little as a third as much!
Being a relatively short flange distance (from sensor to mount) the Canon EF mount is able to adapt to several other DSLR lenses, including Nikon, Pentax and M42. Although you will lose autofocus, this is a great way to try lenses from other systems, or just have access to some fascinating and budget retro lenses. It's unfortunate, but the older Canon FD (manual) lenses cannot be adapted to EF without losing infinity focus or adding optics that will affect image quality, due to an even shorter flange distance there.
Canon EF 50/1.8II | f/4 | 1/200th | iso 100
Memory
The DCS 560 has two PCMCIA memory card slots. Originally, memory cards were made directly in this format, but the easiest solution today is to get a PCMCIA to Compact Flash adapter and then use CF cards. The camera only supports memory up to 2GB in size. Larger cards may be accepted, but once formatted will only have 2GB of space. 2GB cards will allow you to store about 500 shots.
One interesting old memory card that I found was a 2GB Sandisk SD Plus USB card, which can be inserted directly into a USB socket. If you can find one of these and would like to avoid a compact flash reader, then perhaps get a compact flash to SD adapter too. This way you can take your images directly to a laptop... as long as it has a USB-A port of course.
I picked up a 1GB IBM Microdrive recently (2003), which housed an actual spinning hard disk inside a Compact Flash (CF) memory card. Amazingly, back in the days of the DCS 560, Microdrives were cheaper than equivalently sized solid state CF cards. Now that solid state memory has far surpassed the sizes of microdrives, they are an obscure piece of tech to see today and another fun look back into early digital photography equipment. If you use Microdrives, just remember they will consume quite a bit more power.
Batteries
This camera (and my DCS 760) came with a bunch of official Kodak batteries, which are the same size. Kodak shipped the cameras with the earlier Ni-CAD type and sold the superior Ni-MH (above) versions, which lasted about three times longer. Most of these official ones will be difficult to charge today. 3rd party batteries are quite easy to find today (2025) and will cost about €30 each.
If you're looking to buy one of these old cameras, make sure it comes with the battery charger because they are not easy to find. The charger that came with the DCS 560 was a first generation one (flat top, orange text) and the one that came with the DCS 760 was a second generation (sloped top, white text). Both will charge both battery versions fine. There was an unofficial charger that was sold in the early 2000s, but all three versions are rare as rocking horse shit today. I highly recommend checking out this page to understand more about the batteries and charging.
I have managed to get three of the original Kodak Ni-MH batteries to hold a charge again. I didn't use the 9v battery trick, mentioned in the above link, but by switching them between the old and new chargers I managed to get the conditioning to bring them to life. Once I got the lights to stop flashing (unchargeable) I left them in the charger overnight, and they seem to be useable again, but let's see how long they last compared to a new one...
Canon EF 50/1.8II | f/4 | 1/320th | iso 100
Speed
One frame per second, for only four seconds sounds restrictive for some types of photography today, but anyone used to being careful with film would have not found this too strange in 1998 despite many film cameras technically being able to do much more. These days, it's a fun perspective to see while using this camera as a relic. The startup time was perhaps more problematic, however. If you saw something that you needed to shoot right away and your camera was off, you were best off forgetting about it.
Due to the price, these cameras were reserved for professionals, but it was here that the benefits made the most sense anyway. The convenience and speed that came from digital, compared to developing film, was undeniable. For professionals who wanted to see and process images much more quickly for a client, this upgrade would have been amazing! Today we are so spoiled, having access to cameras that can do far more than this ever could in a far smaller, lighter and cheaper package. Yet, smartphones have further shrunken the need for even those amazing devices.
Competition
These older Kodak cameras predate any purpose built DSLRs from Nikon, Canon etc. However, the Nikon E series digital cameras (co-developed with Fujifilm) used a prism to bend and magnify the light from the lens onto a 2/3 inch sensor. They could retain the full frame view, but were limited in their minimum apertures. Although they looked like purpose built DSLRs, they were actually built around a Nikon F4 film camera chassis' and parts, and technically did not function as an SLR. They were also quite expensive ($10,000 or $21,000 adjusted for inflation in 2025) and made the Kodak DCS cameras look positively elegant by comparison, albeit more expensive.
The only other serious digital competition at the time was medium format cameras with digital scan-backs. Those would have been even more expensive than the Kodak DCS systems. They would have produced nice looking images, but were realistically limited to slow studio use.
Canon EF 85L | f/1.2 | 1/320th | iso 160
Resources
Here are a few useful links if you own, or are considering owning, one of these old machines:
Unfortunately, the last link only contains a basic specification, as the camera slightly predates the DP Review website (which we are lucky to still have in 2025). This is also true of most links if you google the camera today. Not many people have written much about it, and so this inspired me even more to make this retro review.
Conclusion
The Kodak DCS 560 is a real collectable as it approaches its thirtieth birthday. Although not technically as interesting as the DCS 760, with its removable prism and Nikon F5 shutter, it has more historical value today. Its image quality is let down by the filter and colour science, but it comes from a time before purpose built DSLRs existed, so anything that comes out feels pretty special.
Gear like this was never going to age like a mechanical film camera. The more I use it, the more fragile its electronics and software stability seems. If you're lucky enough to find one of these ancient machines working today, you'll be hoping that the autofocus, memory card reader, mirror assembly and electronics hold up after each shot. It's amazing that anyone still makes the batteries for this camera. Although, the chargers are not easy to find, so make sure to get a one with the camera. It's extra nice that 2025 brings support for the images natively in Photoshop. I really did not expect that. If you find an older DSLR, it will likely be exponentially more difficult to get it working, or to format a memory card, or to process the images etc.
Despite being built around a smaller camera with more plastic than the DCS 760, the 560 weight is only a fraction lighter and the shutter noise is nowhere near as awesome (I do like some Canon shutters, the 1Ds is beautiful). The DCS 560 is not quite my oldest DSLR. I have been sitting on the Minolta RD-175 review for over three years now. I must get my finger out and do more with that camera!
To round out this review, here are some more images of the camera itself...
More Squirrels
Here are a few more photos of squirrels. The last one of the four images was taken with the internal hot mirror filter removed and using the calibrated colour profile. I don't think the colours are anything special here, in fact they're quite strange (it was particularly dull here). However, I do think this image is noticeably sharper than the other. What do you think?
