This is definitely not like any camera you've ever used; in fact it's really a digital cross-breed of camera and computer. Yet it might be just what you need for the tricks it performs that the other two can't. Don't buy it just because it has the highest resolution; the image dimensions are such you'll have to crop top or bottom or both to get a decently proportioned print (unless you routinely shoot pictures of basketball players) so you lose the resolution advantage right from the start. For example, printing an 8"x10" image drops the resolution from 1536 by 1024 to 1280 by 1024, which is the same as the D600L.

But the DC 260 is the only one of the three that has external flash synch with a range of user selectable f-stops from f-3 through f-22. In the "Garden" picture I taped a Sigma .45 ultra-wide auxiliary lens to the camera's lens barrel and used a very weak Morris bare-tube strobe to give some subtle fill-in. Using the built-in flash would have blown out the foreground and rendered the statue pasty white. If you do studio work with strobes and want to test the digital waters, the DC 260 will let you get your toes wet without the risk of drowning in debt.

The LCD preview screen doesn't deliver a full 30 fps, so its image is jerky when you move the camera, but you can use it to frame static objects precisely and the camera also has an optical viewfinder for tracking faster motion. The DC 260 has a great repertoire...time lapse, camera-to-camera image transfer, watermarking, placing pictures in separate albums within the camera, burst shooting at higher resolutions than most others, and sound annotation of each image.

And on the way are new scripts, downloadable to the camera...oops, Cam-Puter...which will provide even more menu options. You have to give the Rochester Gang credit for pulling out the stops on this one. The DC 260 boldly goes where no digital camera has gone before.