So its not made by Canon.

PLONK
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More that it's lighter and smaller. No film-wind mechanism needed, no
space allocated to a film casette.

    [ ... ]

    I have two such cameras.  Started life as Nikon N90s (and N90)
camera bodies.  Kodak added a digital back and sub-base to the camera
(originally for the AP).

    Interface to the camera is through the fancy remote interface
(10 pins -- for more than just a remote shutter  release button).

    As for the battery problem -- the base contained the
electronics, the PCMCIA hard disk drive, the microphone, the SCSI
interface to the computer, and eight rechargeable AA sized cells in a
sealed pack.  A pair of wires, run through a regulator, were soldered
into the battery holder for the N90s and that was plugged into the
bottom of the body as the camera and sensor were joined.

    The only problems, from my point of view (other than the rather
limited 1.3 MP resolution, and the weird RAW format (the only choice)
which has only recently been handled *properly* by dcraw (thanks,
David), were that the camera felt that it had to advance the "film" with
every shot, wasting a bit of battery life and producing more noise

    Also, when you changed PCMCIA disk drives, the camera started
counting image file names from the frame number stored in the camera,
which was never reset to zero, because there was no film to rewind and
reload. :-)

    Image file names were the frame number multiplied by ten, and
thus incremented in steps of ten (to save the intermediate file names
for the voice annotation records via the built-in microphone.  These
frame numbers would count up to 99 and then roll over, causing the file
names to sort out of image order.  Once the camera took the full 99
exposures, it then would increment another digit so the names would jump
past the earlier exposures.  So -- looking at a directory listing of the
results of a day's active shooting, you would get:

DSC00000.TIF    <---------- Next shots -------------------------------+
    .                                                             |
    .                                                             |
DSC00440.TIF     >------------Now we jump to ----------------------------+
                                                                     |  |
DSC00450.TIF    <-- First shot on newly formatted PCMCIA hard disk    |  |
    .                                                             |  |
    .                                                             |  |
    .                                                             |  |
DSC00990.TIF    >- Rollover point -- goes to -------------------------+  |
                                                                        |
DSC01000.TIF    <---- first shot past the initial 100 numbers -----------+
    .
    .    and continue to
    .
DSC02240.TIF   >---  Final end exposure number.

    Yes -- you could sort by date/time instead of alpha-numerically,
but  the alpha-numeric sort order is the default.

    I never did find a way to reset the frame number to zero when
changing a PCMICA disk drive -- even after telling the camera to
"rewind" the "film".  (It made appropriate grunching noises, but I guess
that the frame number would not set to zero until you either opened the
back (not a reasonable option with a digital), or perhaps even until you
fed it some film to actually "load".  (I'm not sure what the behavior of
the frame counter with real film was, as I don't have the backs to use
the camera with film.)

    So -- you can see that there can be some problems with
integrating a digital back into a film camera not made for it.  (FWIW,
the converted camera also did not have a LCD image display, so
"chimping" was not an option.  The only thing the display on the small
LCD on the back told you was the number of exposures remaining on the
diskdrive (247 exposures on a 640 MB PCMCIA hard drive), and a
six-segment "pie chart" to show you graphically how much of the disk
drive you had used. Also, there was a battery charge indicator. (It
would also display the SCSI ID when you were changing that.)

    Since the batteries were hard-wired into the back/sub-base, you
could not change them in the field, and you had several hours of
charging time before the camera became fully usable again.

    But yes -- such things *do* exist -- and these would work well
with the older Nikon AI lenses.  (But, it would *not* work with pre-AI
lenses, unless you replaced or modified the aperture ring to add the AI
tabs to the older lens.

    Enjoy,
        DoN.