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| Konica’s Super Wide |
A funny thing happened to point-and-shoot cameras on the way to the digital age. No sooner do people buy a good digital camera than they buy a whole pile of film cameras.
Is it anti-digital backlash? Hardly. Say you’ve bought a cool new 4- or 5-megapixel cutie with all sorts of neato features. Now, do you really want to take that $599 digital camera on your white-water rafting trip? Or lend it to your kid for the pool party?
We didn’t think so.
And so people just like you buy single-use cameras for situations in which dependability and expendability are the key camera features. And manufacturers are responding with more and more special-purpose (and multi-purpose!) cameras. Here are the latest kardboard kameras and plastic fantastics.
Wild and Wide!
The award for good, wacky fun unquestionably goes to Konica, for its FiLM-iN Super Wide, a full-frame 35mm camera with a 17mm lens—plus a special flash that more or less covers this extreme angle of view. Just to remind you, a 17mm lens is to a 35mm lens what the Grand Canyon is to the old watering hole—a 108-degree angle of view, versus 64 degrees.
Konica is marketing this camera as both a wide scenic snapper and a group self-portrait camera. A lens this wide can easily get two people in the picture with the camera held at arm’s length (three if you scrunch together). As a composition aid, the camera has a wide-angle mirror around the lens.
The camera has strange contours and weird protuberances—for good reason. The long body and ridge around the lens keeps fingers outta the picture.
We tried some Super Wides, and were impressed with the results: pretty sharp, and very little distortion at the edges.
The optical viewfinder is somewhere between awful and crappy, but that’s part of the fun. Approx. street price: $9; 27 exposures, ISO 800 color print, without processing.
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