Canon PowerShot 600 (1996)

< Prev Next >

The Canon Powershot 600 was a bulky camera and by bulky I mean large. After having marketed the PCMCIA camera CE300 it was Canon's first consumer digital camera and the first of the POWERSHOT series. A digital camera product line that had to become one of the best-selling series of all time. By the end of 2008, Canon had shipped and sold their 100 millionth digital camera.

Although the Dycam and Logitech Fotoman were the first consumer digital cameras to sport a sort of docking station, it was the PS 600 that sucessfully implemented it in the consumer digital camera section. There was nothing much one could do with this camera. It did not have an LCD screen to (p)review images. It was a simple point-and-shoot camera. But images could be recorded in RAW format and therefore uncompressed. Also a handy black-and-white mode was available for copying documents. A PCMCIA Type II and III card could be used and an optional wide lens converter was also available. The docking station had a parallell port and the camera could be connected to a personal computer. The camera also had 1MB of internal memory and a built-in flash. The recording of audio was also possible. The camera could be powered on by putting it in the docking station and attaching a power supply, or by inserting a dedicated NiCd battery or by using six regular AA batteries (only by using the optional battery holder BH-10).

To the right you can see a fully-fledged PowerShot 600 in it's docking station with the optional wide lens converter.