A saga 15 years in the making, I took one of these out for a shoot. A local company maintains a public garden for people to walk in/take photos so it's a good place to zip in and try a digital or film camera out.
It seems to have a quirk that if it's sat for a bit and goes to sleep it doesn't want to wake up, so I need to insert/remove the battery. By the end of the shoot when I took the battery out it was a little difficult to remove, probably because it was about 90 and heat had expanded things slightly.
I held the external part of the battery in my hand and used one of the "Digital FlashFilm" cards. The lens was a Tokina 28-70mm "ATX Pro" that served me well in my concert/event shooting days. As I wasn't familiar with how the camera shot or exposed I used Program Mode with Matrix metering.
Overall the experience of shooting it was very pleasant. It's a big camera but not really heavy, and fits my hands well. Autofocus is a single center point and snappy with no hunting around. The controls are buttons with a command dial so similar in some ways to newer Nikons but I doubt I could adjust it in the dark as I can with my D780. The viewfinder, which looks though the optical reduction, only had a little haze/color aberration. The red/green lights at top for focus and the small scale at bottom for exposure were both easy to read and use.
Each shot has a satisfying "Tha-Chunk WHIRR" sound, the whirr probably being the mirror servo resetting, but it sounds for all the world like a film advance. I didn't try any action shots unless you count the fish in the pond or the flags in the breeze, but it was still very easy to run out the buffer. My only really "missed" shots were some purple lilacs were I was trying to photograph the bees pollinating and a bookshelf in the school building.
My only "D'Oh" moment was when I got home I realized I had the quality setting in normal mode rather than HI setting. However this was to my advantage as 55 shots almost filled up a 20MB drive as JPEG files. In HI they're sent out as TIFF files. I did a few photos at home as TIFF and 5 shots completely filled a 15MB drive.
Viewing the photos (JPEG or TIFF) was a mixed bag:
Colors tended to be good, if a little on the warm side
Dynamic range was not much, but better than expected, about the 2 stop range of contemporary early digital cameras
Metering was generally correct, if it exposed for white areas like flower petals it was a little dark, which nearly all cameras do
When highlights blew out, they completely went out, no hope for recovery
Resolution was the killer, as when I look at a few the thumbnail looked great, but on screen I first thought maybe the autofocus was off, but no, I was blowing it up so large on my 4K monitor it was going well beyond the sensor's resolution. The old standard of "good for web use" with vintage cameras like this has passed it by at this point.
I tried some batch editing but there was so little room for adjustment it barely made a difference, I mostly just made the shadows and dark areas much worse for a minimal highlight reduction. So for your edification and enjoyment, here (finally) is my DS-505A gallery:
Straight out of the camera
https://photos.app.goo.gl/KVzeQR1jgjwgshS77
The TIFF files (Tagged Image File Format) offered somewhat better quality. I couldn't get DCS Photo Desk to run on the XP machine (?) and my current raw editor (Darktable) can read and process the files but they come out with a strange texturing almost like a coarse paper watermark. Someday I'll get Lightroom and try again. For now here's what it is:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/8C4BfdnF3yXscTnS9
Photoshoot of the camera itself
https://photos.app.goo.gl/cEKbvPPFHCSbU7AG7