Contax N Digital
image by Kent Demas (Image rights) |
The Contax N Digital is historically significant as the first (2001) digital SLR to use a "full frame" 24×36 mm sensor, a 6-megapixel chip supplied by Phillips. The camera design itself was derived from the Contax N1 autofocus 35mm film body, offering the exciting possibility of using well-regarded Carl Zeiss-branded Contax lenses.
Unfortunately, the manufacturer of the Contax brand, Kyocera, encountered a number of problems in bringing this model to market, perhaps underestimating the challenges of designing a responsive image-processing pipeline. Within a few years, the brand Contax had vanished from the digital-camera marketplace entirely.
Links
- Contax N preview from Imaging Resource
- Contax N Digital review (post-mortem?) by Irakly Shanidze at Luminous Landscape