Kodak DC210 Plus

The Kodak DC210 Plus Zoom is a late-1990s digital point-and-shoot. It still felt like a gadget when it was new. It's fully digital, no film involved, built around a 1160 x 872 CCD (good for a maximum image of 1152 x 872, or 1152 x 864 depending on the source, roughly a megapixel). It captures 24-bit color and has a 2x zoom, which was a headline feature at the time. The non-zoom DC200 Plus shared the same manual and much of the same hardware.

The DC210 Plus was sold with the "Zoom" name partly to tell it apart from the fixed-lens DC200 Plus. Beyond the zoom, it added a close-up mode and an infrared connection for beaming images to a compatible device. The DC200 lacked both. The rest of the controls are standard late-90s digital camera: a mode dial, an LCD status display, a real optical viewfinder, built-in flash, self-timer, exposure compensation and lock, a tripod thread, and a serial port for hooking up to a PC. It ran on AA batteries, which the period press noted it went through quickly. The Independent (December 1999) pointed out one saving grace: it could be connected to the mains while downloading images to a computer.

Kodak shipped it with installation software, a Mounter utility for treating the camera like a disk drive, and TWAIN Acquire software for pulling images into other applications. Images were stored on a removable memory card, and an 8 MB card was commonly bundled. The camera supported the FlashPix file format, a spec Kodak developed jointly with Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Live Picture. The manual covers both the DC200 Plus and DC210 Plus. An illustration note says that, unless stated otherwise, the pictures show the DC210.

One owner on a photography blog recalls buying one on August 11, 1999, as their first digital camera, and notes it still worked years later. Another commenter called it a "great little camera. Only 1mp, but took good images." It was an accessible entry point into digital photography, not a professional tool, and it sold widely at around £400 in the UK at Christmas 1999. Production dates aren't documented in the sources available.

Known specs, as documented: