I see so many printers, cameras and odd bits of computer technology that many just whiz past. But I have been charmed. Everyone I showed the Kodak DC260 wanted to pick it up, something that does not always happen with digital cameras. But the comment it seemed to draw most often was 'ugly'. It may not be the prettiest design, but the DC260 is by far the most practical. It marks something of a coming of age for digital cameras, because it has the first chassis not modelled on a conventional camera. For one, the viewfinder is mounted in the upper left corner of the body, directly over the lens. This may not seem important, but digital cameras are rather notorious for having viewfinders that do not show exactly what the camera is shooting. Another pet peeve eliminated by the DC260's design is greasy LCD syndrome. The LCDs on most other cameras can be hard to see in bright sunlight - often they have a nose print in the middle. Kodak's viewfinder placement puts your nose to the side of the camera, eliminating nose-LCD interface. The built-in software in the Kodak DC260 is slick and its simple white-on-blue menus will impress. It has colour graphics and sound effects played through a built-in speaker, with a range of settings for shooting and playback. Settings can be selected through a very well-designed button on the back. Beyond the fact that the camera is a little slow to start, my only complaint was with the sound effect that plays when you shoot a picture. I am not sure you need to hear something that sounds like the shutter in a cheap point-and-shoot camera. The speaker allows you to play back audio you can record through the microphone on the camera back. This feature has been incorporated into most Kodak pro cameras and is handy for recording details, especially if images are work-related. Among other features, the camera has a standard PC socket for shooting with external flash units, a 3X zoom lens, and image storage on a removable CompactFlash memory card. The included 8-megabyte card stores about 14 images at the highest-quality setting. With maximum compression and minimum resolution, the card will hold nearly 100 images, but with low clarity. Image quality at the highest setting is good. A 5x7 inch print showed some compression noise. Even though the file size at the highest resolution yields a 4.5 MB file, the Kodak's lens and higher Jpeg compression mean images are not quite as sharp and noise-free as those taken with the Olympus C-1400L, the best digital camera I have seen. Since Kodak has given the camera three compression settings, I do not see why it could not have made the compression milder at the highest-quality setting. This would have meant fewer pictures per card, but would have reduced compression noise, giving users the option of an extremely high-quality image. The $6,400 Kodak DC260 is an ugly duckling that turned out to be a swan. The image quality is not the best in this price range, but it is the most usable and versatile I have seen. One last point, and an pretty amazing one for a digital still camera: I shot enough images to fill that 8 MB card several times over, downloaded them, played with the camera, showed images to friends. Not once did I use the AC adapter, yet the battery indicator still read full when I returned the camera to Kodak.