Kodak Introduces $1,000 Digital Camera

The days of film rolls and darkroom photography may be fast fading. Eastman Kodak Co. today will introduce a digital camera for under $1,000 that produces unusually sharp photographs for the price, an advance that could give an important boost to the filmless gizmos. The price of Rochester, N.Y.-based Kodak’s DC120 Zoom Digital camera isn’t seen by industry analysts as low enough to attract casual photographers, used to paying under $300 for film-based cameras that take snapshots good enough for the family album. But Kodak’s new camera could attract hobbyists and professionals in businesses who require images to be quickly sent. Digital cameras look like other point-and-shoot cameras, but instead of relying on film to record the picture, they use a photosensitive chip called a charged-coupled device, or CCD. It resolves an image into dots, or pixels, which the camera stores in its memory as digital bits. From there, the images can be downloaded straight to a computer.