It was announced at the photographic trade show photokina in Germany during September 2002; production examples became available in May 2003.

Featuring a 13.89 Megapixel (4560 x 3048 pixels total) full frame 24 x 36 mm CMOS sensor, the DCS Pro 14n was the second full-frame digital SLR to reach the market, after the unsuccessful and short lived Contax N Digital and came one day before the successful Canon EOS-1Ds .

All previous digital SLRs had sensors smaller than a film frame and thus had a crop factor larger than 1.0, making a wide-angle field of view difficult to achieve.

A monochrome variant, known unofficially as Kodak Professional DCS Pro 14n m and based on the same CMOS image sensor, existed as well.

In particular, the new camera featured an improved image sensor and better power management, and it came with 512 MiB of buffer memory pre-installed.