Fujifilm product is digital, requires no special glasses to view
Marke Andrews
Sun
Fuji’s FinePix W1 REAL 3D camera will be available in Canada this fall. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION/FUJIFILM
I had barely settled into a chair when Greg Poole grabbed the camera, shot me in my best deer-in-the-headlights pose, then displayed my 3-D image on the digital camera’s screen.
My nose looked like an approaching torpedo. For a moment, I thought it was the boulder that chased Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Poole, vice-president of Fujifilm Canada‘s imaging products division, was showing off the FinePix W1 REAL 3D, the world’s first 3-D digital camera, which will arrive in Canadian stores on Oct. 1.
For a guy marketing a new product, Poole was not exactly in Tony Robbins mode. This camera is the first of its kind, and there are a few bugs to work out, Poole admits.
Its price ($699), and the price of its accessories ($499 for the FinePix REAL 3D V1, a larger viewer frame with an eight-inch screen) will give consumers pause. The fact that you cannot view your images in 3-D on your Mac, PC or television screen is also a negative. If you want 3-D prints of your photos, they have to be done at Fujifilm’s Japan headquarters, for about $10 per print.
“It’s not the world’s most perfect camera, yet,” said Poole, in Vancouver to demonstrate Fujifilm’s fall lineup of products, which includes two new models of the company’s popular EXR digital cameras.
“3-D is going to be very big,” said Poole, who said it was the buzzword at the annual Consumer Electronics Association trade show in Las Vegas in January. “What I’m really excited about is the second-, third- and fourth-generations of this device.”
So, if the best is yet to come, who will buy this first model? Poole expects consumers who want to be the first on their block with the latest toy will buy. So will professional photographers who use 3-D technology. Doctors, dentists and other professionals can use the photos for 3-D slide shows in their waiting rooms. He’s been contacted by a filmmaker who makes 3-D movies and wants to use the camera for location scouting.
3-D photography has been around for 100 years, but it always involved film and special 3-D glasses to view the results. The new Fujifilm 10-million-pixel camera is digital and requires no funny specs to view the results. The camera, which is the size of a large calculator, has two lenses that shoot the subject, in the words of Fujifilm’s press material, “as your eyes see it.” It can also shoot 3-D movies and 2-D images. It has a number of settings to capture 3-D landscapes and long-distance views.
Releasing the camera is really a branding exercise on the part of Fujifilm, which will be known as the company that led the 3-D charge into the digital camera breach. But like the VHS-vs-Beta video-cassette recorder battle of the 1980s, and the more recent Blu-Ray-vs-HD DVD debate, the 3-D technology will require agreement among major corporate players — Fujifilm, Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Panasonic — to agree on a format so that you can take pictures with your FinePix W1 REAL 3D camera and get proper 3-D images from your computer or flat-screen TV.
“Unless you have some standardization, the world won’t bite,” Poole said.
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