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When I was in high school, one of my favourite magazines was Road & Track, a publication famous for tongue-in-cheek reviews of expensive cars.

 The magazine once compared a high-performance racing truck with a Ferrari using, among other criteria, beer keg-carrying capacity.

 As I recall, the Ferrari lost; it could only carry a pony keg on the passenger seat.

 My favourite story was about the Ferrari F40. Some wealthy Californian agreed to lend the author his for a review. The experience went from every sports-car enthusiast's dream to the sudden reality nightmare that he was behind the wheel of a million bucks worth of car that didn't belong to him, had about two inches of ground clearance and he was about to go cruising around on the pothole-filled streets of Los Angeles.

 The story flashed into my mind a few weeks ago when Kodak told me it had a DCS560 I could borrow for a weekend. Costing $250,000, the 560 is the cutting-edge in portable digital cameras.

 Based on a Canon EOS-1n body, the 560 looks exactly like an older Kodak camera, the DCS520, and is similarly hefty. Short of studio models that can operate only while tethered to a computer, nothing comes close to matching the 560's resolution.

 At a whopping 18 megabytes per image, the image quality of pictures taken by the 560 would let it cover an entire page of Technology Post.

 I left the training room at Kodak House on a Friday afternoon and strolled off into a light afternoon's drizzle with this quarter-million-dollar camera, without even signing for it.

 When I got back to the office, a loan agreement was waiting for me at the fax machine.

 Damn, just as was getting a quote on a one-way plane ticket to Barbados! Responsibility now set firmly on my shoulders, I carefully tucked the DCS560 into my padded waist bag, dumped it on the floor of a taxi and headed home.

 I had a chance to put the DCS560 through its paces both in the studio and out. The first few images I shot were done in the studio, a head-and-shoulders portrait of a man wearing a bright red jacket. I mention the jacket as I have found some things that digital cameras do not reproduce well - shiny, red nylon is one of them.

 The photo was absolutely stunning. Beyond the resolution, the colour made the image look like something that had been shot on medium-format rather than a 35mm camera. The red nylon did look a bit funny, but printed realistically.

 There are a few little downsides to the DCS560, beyond the six-figure price tag. The ASA range is limited on the low end to 80 and on the high end to only 200.

 This camera is not a low-light machine. If you have visions of tripods dancing in your head, remember to pop off the anti-aliasing filter in the mirror box.

 Kodak tells me the filter pops off easily, but I did not have the guts to try it. The filter cuts down on infrared light, which tends to turn digital images red.

 The filter also blurs the images slightly, to eliminate specular highlights - small brightly coloured dots that appear in pinpoint highlights in digital images.

 However, if you make an exposure longer than half a second with the anti-aliasing filter on, you risk actually creating specular highlights, caused by light bouncing off of the shiny surface of the CCD then into the anti-aliasing filter where it is seen by the CCD.

 Kodak also recommends removing the anti-aliasing filter to improve sharpness if you are working in the controlled lighting of the studio.

 Infrared light can be eliminated with filters on the strobes or on the camera lens. When the anti-aliasing filter needs to be left in, the 560 has built-in software sharpening to compensate for its blurring effect, but I would recommend turning this feature off. You can do a better job in Photoshop.

 One other possible downer is the CCD size, which, even on this 18-megabyte monster, is still smaller than a 35mm frame.

 That means that your lenses all become 1.3 times more powerful than when shooting with a 35mm film camera.

 Telephotos become more powerful and no dimmer, but wide angles are not that wide anymore. My 20mm suddenly was a 26mm, hardly adequate for shooting buildings or Hong Kong's tight spaces.

 So I am sitting here looking over the bank account which contains my life savings, contemplating all of the far more sensible things I could buy if I even had $250,000 to spend.

 If one of you out there has a DCS560, do not speak to me. I do not want to know how you love your 560 or hear anecdotes about how you have put it to good use. I really hate you.



Ferrari of digital cameras proves a star