| Sign in: |
| Members log in here with your user name and password to access the your admin page and other special features. |
|
|
|
|
|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Remembering the NC2000
Stephen Voss, Photographer
 |
Portland | OR | USA | Posted: 12:15 PM on 01.14.05 |
->> Rob Galbraith has a great story about one of the very first digital cameras used for newspaper work, the NC2000.
1.3 megapixels, nonremovable battery and ungodly noise at higher ISOs, it's a great read:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-6463-7191 |
|
DJ Werner, Photographer
|
Beaufort | NC | USA | Posted: 2:17 PM on 01.14.05 |
->> ah yes -- the old brick, the doorstop,the boat anchor...
I remember having to go back to the nc2000 when the D1 was off for repairs.....what a nightmare...LOL
D |
|
Wesley R. Bush, Photographer
 |
Nashville | TN | U.S. | Posted: 2:25 PM on 01.14.05 |
| ->> Every letter of that article is right on the money. Purple or pink flames, red skin, noise at anything over 1/4 second or 200 iso. #9 in my gallery was shot with one. God I loved that camera. |
|
Nhat V. Meyer, Photographer
|
San Jose | CA | USA | Posted: 3:03 PM on 01.14.05 |
->> Thanks for the flashbacks, I have been trying my best to forget those dark days... Luckily we only had that thing for about a year until we got the DCS-520.
Not only was that nasty box about a foot tall and weighed 10 pounds but the non-removable battery was ingenious. The NC2000e we had wouldn't make it through four quarters of a football game... so if you didn't recharge at half-time you were screwed... overtime game, I think not.
That's how I learned to shoot tight - you had to or the file looked horrible (the file looked horrible before cropping). And the digital media - huge - with an internal spinning harddrive so if you dropped it (which one fellow staffer did, only about a foot) you'd lose all the information!
Good times, good times. No LCD (no chimping), 1.3 megapixel file, and 6 frame buffer... be thankful for what you have now! |
|
Michael J. Treola, Photographer
|
Neptune | NJ | USA | Posted: 3:43 PM on 01.14.05 |
->> Oh Yeah! Batteries that lasted 20 minutes, big giant PCMCIA cards, SLOOOOW buffer (if you wanted to call it that). 800 ISO images that looked like were shot at 9900 ISO (if there was such a thing).
I will say though that camera allowed my paper to do things that we could never do before. It was a technical nightmare but still was cool for its time.
Tree
http://www.michaeltreola.com |
|
Steven E. Frischling, Photographer
 |
New England | | USA | Posted: 3:43 PM on 01.14.05 |
->> The article leaves out the short lived, and yet slightly flawed AP NC2000c. I had an NC2000c for a while.
This camera was big, heavy, and of course had a horrible colour cast problem. I started with AP Photo Viewer as my plug in, then moved to Quantum Mechanic and Photo Mechanic, what a slice of heaven Quantum Mechanic was. I used to really enjoy the battery lasted an hour or two outside covering news and sports in Vermont, at least the Quantum Battery would keep the camera alive, while powering my Vivitar 283.
Also not mentioned is the very short lived NC2000g (never used it, it seemed to come out well after the DCS 520 and DCS 620)
Ahhh memory lane of shooting and praying, and the screams of horror as my 160mb Viper Card would fall from my frozen hands to the pavement.
(speaking of this, where are Raj and Glen from Burlington on this. They had NC2000e bodies in the frozen north of Vermont) |
|
Michael J. Treola, Photographer
|
Neptune | NJ | USA | Posted: 3:50 PM on 01.14.05 |
->> Also brings back memories of the AP Photo Lynx that we used to get the photos out of the NC2000 camera and back to the office on deadline.
For those of you who never seen one it was a Mac laptop with another attachment on the bottom of it that accepted the card and it also had a film scanner built in too.
It was slow as hell and was the size of a truck but it worked when we needed it too.
Tree |
|
Randy Janoski, Photographer
|
Chapel Hill | TN | USA | Posted: 4:20 PM on 01.14.05 |
->> You "youngsters" of the digital age make me chuckle!
Get out and talk to some of us with gray hair. I can remember back in the late 70's and early 80' when my production department was contained in a footlocker that had to travel with me.
Many fine locals down in Central America, in some hell hole of a hotel room, processing film in a filthy bathroom, room temp around 100*F at night, make a couple B&W 8X10's, open up the Leaf print drum scanner, plug in or often splice into a phone line, dial-up and sit back with a bottle of some bad mezcal and wait about 25 minutes for that first print to transmit through.
Now that was photographic entertainment! |
|
Steven E. Frischling, Photographer
|
New England | | USA | Posted: 4:24 PM on 01.14.05 |
->> Mike
The 60lbs "Black Box" of horror? Those were fun, esspecially with pay phones |
|
Jeff Blake, Photographer
|
Athens | GA | USA | Posted: 5:10 PM on 01.14.05 |
| ->> Yikes, that camera gave me so many nightmares. I was so happy when we got our first D1's, it was like night and day. And they were so heavy, shooting a basketball game, your forearms would be sore at the end of the game! Everything magenta, hard to use fill-flash, ugh. We still have those $15, 000 boat anchors sitting around our photo department. |
|
Jeff Stanton, Photographer
|
Tucson | AZ | USA | Posted: 6:51 PM on 01.14.05 |
| ->> That thing was a turd! |
|
David Rossiter, Photographer
|
Lethbridge | AB | Canada | Posted: 6:59 PM on 01.14.05 |
| ->> Every time I read a thread about how bad my Nikon D2H cameras apparently are .... I go and stroke my old analog UPI drum scanner that I kept from the good ole days, then do a happy dance! |
|
Matt Miller, Photographer
|
Omaha | NE | USA | Posted: 7:52 PM on 01.14.05 |
->> actually, yesterday i met a man who is publisher at a small weekly newspaper in northeast nebraska. he told me how he still used an old nikon. i assumed he meant the nikon d1, and introduced him to noise ninja...then he started opening up the nc2000 files.
and he did not even put an expletive modifier when he talked about still using the camera. i felt pretty lucky to have my canons at the end of the day. |
|
Thomas E. Witte, Photographer
|
Cincinnati | OH | USA | Posted: 9:36 PM on 01.14.05 |
->> I laughed hysterically reading that article. It was true on so many levels. Looking at the fire photos, moiré in the shingles and being reminded of the gradient color shifts took me on a trip down memory lane that is best accompanied with a crate of anti anxiety medications and straight jacket. In the brief 6 months I used that POS I went through two 200 count bottles of Advil.
The two most poignant quotes in that article were Kurdzuk's: "The NC2000, in general, was a practice in masochistic anxiety." And; "I could never trust what the camera was doing. When you popped that card into the computer there was always that little thought in the back of your mind: what happened this time, what went wrong? But you kept doing it because it was so cool."
To say the camera took artistic license with photo is an understatement.
I can't believe it was just about five years ago I was using that thing. Egads, thank god for Moore's Law. |
|
Neal Vaughan, Photographer
|
St. Joseph | MI | USA | Posted: 10:35 PM on 01.14.05 |
->> Hah, what a trip reading that article. I got the short end of the stick when I started my first internship sometime back 99 at the Mansfield News Journal. As I recall the staffers had just gotten Nikon D1's, and I was primarily using film but was forced to use that the NC2000 if I wanted to be part of any of their OSU or browns coverage teams . Oh man. What a nightmare that camera was. It was so hard to get used to shooting it with the awkward crop box that it utlized. To see the nikon d2x returning to something similar to the nc2000 is a bit eerie.
Still, as much as that camera was possibly the worst I've ever shot with short of a holga, I've still got an image in my portfolio from it. Amazes me. |
|
Billy Suratt, Photographer, Photo Editor
|
Russell Springs | KY | USA | Posted: 12:22 AM on 01.15.05 |
| ->> I wonder if David Burnett will start dragging an NC2000e along for the 2024 presidential campaign? lol |
|
Dave Chidley, Photographer
|
London | Ontario | Canada | Posted: 12:42 AM on 01.15.05 |
->> Hey Rob, your article brings back many memories for me as well.
I was at the 94 Commonwealth Games shooting for Canadian Press and watching the Vancouver shooters with their strange new toys. Running 6 column digital photos of the Queen, proving that it could be done.
Then while working at the Calgary Sun, watching the Calgary Herald staffers for years with one nc2000 body each. So many times the cameras' batteries would die at the worst times. So many times the photographers would be desperately trying to change lenses telephoto to wide or the other way round, in a panic. Photographers praying that their flashes would be in the ballpark for exposure.
We watched so many photos get missed. But we also saw some photos in the paper that would have never made it without the digitals. The paper made a point of replating many "late" photos over better "early" ones just because they could do it.
We also saw the paper make the photographers use the antiques long, long after better models were common. They did spend over a $1/4 million on all that gear. So I guess the "bean counters" wanted to get their money's worth.
So as the competition many times we were happy not to be digital. We were often chastised with arguments like "if it wasn't for papers like us buying this stuff than digital will never get better." I guess it was a valid point but we were glad that we weren't the guinea pigs.
In the end the pioneers like the Vancouver Sun and Province and the Calgary Herald, Mr. Didlick, Mr. Galbraith, and the other trail blazers did make it better for the rest of us.
So for all those frustrating days when I heard Calgary Herald staffers cursing their "boat anchors", thanks, now if only my MarkII's will be delivered soon I'll be happy.
-Dave Chidley |
|
Colin Corneau, Photographer
|
Brandon | MB | Canada | Posted: 4:22 AM on 01.15.05 |
| ->> All this, of course, being a big pause for all those "early adaptors" out there...there's something to be said for holding off, after all! |
|
Dave Chidley, Photographer
|
London | Ontario | Canada | Posted: 8:05 PM on 01.18.05 |
->> I just wanted to clarify that I was in no way being critical of the photographers using the NC2000. They did an amazing job with a very clunky tool. That was the point of my posting. There were many problems and despite that the Herald photographers did an very admirable job producing great photos.
So for all the failings they did prevail and in the end their efforts and the other using the NC2000 made it better for us all. I still consider all the photographers from the Herald in those days to be good friends and an amazing staff that ended up being disbanded.
And that's another topic for another day! |
|
Ian Halperin, Photographer
|
Plano(Dallas) | TX | USA | Posted: 9:49 PM on 01.18.05 |
->> Wow. Seems like only yesterday. The paper I worked at when it came out, the Plano Star Courier, actually shelled out the bucks for NC2000. My first news assignment with it was a debate. One of my final shots was a wide of the stage. There was a clock in the background. The editor could not believe that he was looking at the photo less than 20 minutes after I had shot it. It sold him on digital, as bad as it was.
FYI--You could change the battery. I took ours to the Dallas AP office and they installed a new one.
When I left the paper, my new employer had the DCS400. Not much better. |
|
Return to --> Message Board Main Index
|