NikonWeb.com

No less. It's #330366458480 and it's a "buy it now" auction for £50! Plus £8 p&p. There's an article about it on this very website, which doesn't move me to part with £50 for the camera. It's sold with all the accessories, but "as is", which suggests to me that the battery has gone flat. I have no idea where you'd get a battery for this kind of camera, although John Henshall's review mentions that they are standard camcorder-type batteries - circa 1994. Camcorder battery technology has changed since then.

From what I can tell the RD-175 / ActionCam had the same kind of reduction optical system that was in the Nikon E2, and it also had a x2.0 cropping factor because the sensor was so tiny. It was roughly mid-way in size between the 2/3" sensor used in old Canon Powershot G-series cameras and the Olympus E-10/20, and the modern four-thirds system. It was fixed at ISO 800 and recorded eight bits per channel, as per Henshall's review. This suggests to me that it is both noisy and the optical quality is poor. And from what I have read here it was very fussy with memory cards. It doesn't sound very appealing and I suspect it didn't sound very appealing in 1994.

Still, in the five hours the auction has been up it has attracted 91 page views. I wonder if the access logs for Nikonweb - which is the top search return for "Minolta RD-175" - show 91 new visits. If the auctioneer had any sense, he should have offered £75 to Jarle to rewrite his review into breathless, Ken Rockwell style ("this pioneering lost classic from the golden age blows all modern cameras out of the water") and then set the reserve price to £500 or so and wait for the bids to flood in. But that would be morally wrong.

As mentioned in my article, you *will* need a working SCSI setup (including the Micro Centronics-50 SCSI cable) or an in-camera formatted memory card to make this thing work. There are no workarounds. I would never pay £50 for one of these, especially without a lens and charger (for the record: seems like there was both a SCSI cable and a charger included in this particular auction, but it's still too much, IMO).

A listing like this doesn't cause any traffic spikes, but I think I've had more e-mail questions about this particular camera (Actioncam/RD-175) than any other single Kodak/Nikon camera on NikonWeb.com (even if it's far down on the "most visited pages" list). Strange.

Jarle

Another RD-175 just was sold on ebay.de for 193,-- Euro. From the description it seems to have been a quite complete set. Item number was 200391811290.

Christoph

Hi Christoph and welcome to the vintage DSLR forum! Yes, this looks like a complete kit, and may be the reason why it sold for so much (compared to many other ActionCam camera's I've seen).

Best regards,
Jarle

Well, I just bought one on eBay Australia. Not a particular bargain, but has the full outfit, including a SCSI cable and lens, but apparently minus a memory card. I will see if the software is still downloadable, and if my antique computer with the SCSI card in it still works (haven't fired it up in quite a while, fingers crossed). If I cannot find the software, or cannot get the computer to boot, I may be emailing Jarle with questions...

Cheers,
Ross

Hi Ross,

Amazingly, the drivers are still available here: http://ca.konicaminolta.com/support/ame ... index.html

The Windows file name is RD17520E.EXE (2.2 MB)

I think everything I know is included in the ActionCam article, but feel free to ask. Enjoy!

Jarle

Well, I managed to get it up and running. Thanks, Jarle, for the pointer to the software; it would definitely have been impossible without that (and my pack-rat tendencies, so I have a Win 98 machine with SCSI board that still runs, and a fairly amazing set of SCSI cables with various connectors and gender changers, which linked end-to-end with a total of 5 pieces between the computer and the camera, actually worked). The outfit came with everything except a PCMCIA card or drive; fortunately the first 40 MB card from one of my E series I tried worked, after formatting in the camera linked to the computer.

I am amazed at how good the image quality is. Unusually (compared to old Kodaks, for instance, where Adobe Camera Raw works _much_ better than Photodesk) the Minolta software does far better at decoding the raw files the camera produces than DCRAW or Raw Therapee, which actually don't seem to quite understand the file format--they do produce images but squashed along the short axis to 3:2 format, whereas the real properly interpolated format seems to be 4:3. I think it would be possible to make a respectable 8 X 10 print, pretty impressive for three sensors each with only 768 X 494 pixels.

Produces a very authoritative "thunk" with each exposure. Definitely an interesting piece of digital history, anyway. I wonder how many of these were sold?

Cheers,
Ross

Hi Ross,

Glad you made it work. Yes, image quality is surprisingly good, considering everything. I've been planning to take some more test photos with this camera - haven't used it since I wrote the ActionCam article. Would be nice to see some of yours, if you upload them somewhere.

I had some problems with the Minolta twain driver (if I remember correctly), so I ended up using ThumbsPlus Pro (www.cerious.com) to read the MDC files. I have a feeling the original software will produce even better results.

Jarle

It does? For some reason, I've been under the impression that PhotoDesk will produce the best results. I've usually converted my Kodak files to standard TIFF files using PhotoDesk before processing them in Photoshop. Would be interesting to see (or make) some comparisons between the two.

Jarle

Hi, Jarle

I haven't done extensive comparisons using the older cameras, but particularly with the DCS 14n ACR or Lightroom 2.6 do a really brilliant job, they capture more fine detail than Photodesk while also suppressing a lot of the colour moire that appears in areas with fine details in images converted with Photodesk. The one place they do fall over is in white balance, which photodesk does a much better job of, but it can usually be fixed in ACR with some fiddling. I'm pretty sure I recall similar effects with my DCS 420 and 460, though I haven't used those in a couple of years so memory is fading fast.

Hi,

I find that Photoshop raw conversion works better than Photodesk on my 460c, 560c, 660c and 760c images. The opposite is true on the 620x and 720x images, due to the odd CFA dyes used on the X series image chips.

I don't have any other Kodak model images, because that's the entire list of Kodak DSLRs I've had so far!

I'm using Photoshop 8, aka CS-1. I never upgraded because all my shots are older than PS8 ACR and so don't need newer camera support. PS8 and it's ACR work a lot better on everything (now I'm also including the various Nikon and Canon DSLR images I have) than PS 7 and the original plug-in ACR did.

When I was using PS7, I found that PhotoDesk worked better on the Kodak images. I *think* that PS8 is newer than the latest PD. If so, then that makes a bit of sense to me.

later!

Stan

Thanks for clearing that up. I'll include this in the Vintage Kodak FAQ - if I ever write one

Jarle