25 Years of DPReview: 6 camera features that didn’t make the cut

Images: Samsung

In the twenty-five years since DPReview was founded, camera companies have tried many things to differentiate their products from the competition. This was especially true for compact cameras, where manufacturers threw everything at the wall to see what stuck.

Here are six features camera makers tried that didn’t find long-term success.

Swiveling lenses

The legendary Nikon Coolpix 950 Photo: Jeff Keller

The Nikon Coolpix 950 was one of the most iconic cameras released in the late 1990s. While its features were top-end, it was the design that turned heads. The lens could rotate 270 degrees, so you could place the camera up high, on the ground, or even use it for – gasp – selfies. (The 950 wasn’t actually Nikon’s first swivel camera; that honor belongs to the Coolpix 900.)

Nikon wasn’t the only company in the swivel lens game. As we’ll see a bit later, Casio produced many cameras with them, including the QV-10A, the first consumer digital camera. Sony used the ‘inner swivel’ design on several cameras, such as the DSC-F88. (Sony’s DSC-F505 and successors had more of a ‘swivel body’ than a ‘swivel lens.’)

In my opinion, the coolest swivel lens camera was the Minolta DiMAGE V (not to be mistaken for the DiMAGE 5). While the photo above makes it look wireless, the camera and lens were attached by a ‘lens extension cable’. This was 1997, after all.

The swivel lens faded into obscurity as fully articulating LCDs became more common. It’s possible that weather sealing and durability also played a role in the swivel lens’ demise. It was cool while it lasted, though.

Jump Shot

Photo: iStock/Carles Iturbe Ferre

About 10-15 years ago, ‘jump shots’ like the one shown above were popular, especially with teens and young adults. Taking a jump photo wasn’t easy, though. You’d need to leave out someone in your group, use a tripod, or find a stranger with a good trigger finger.

The engineers at Panasonic developed a feature for its smartphone Image App known as Jump Snap that solves two of those problems. The app lets you adjust the ‘sensitivity’, and then it’s jumping time (with the phone in hand, of course). When the app notices the upward motion from the phone’s gyroscope, it snaps the picture right at the peak of the jump.

There was just one problem that Jump Snap didn’t solve: you still needed a tripod.

Casio’s bells and whistles

The Casio QV-7000SX had the company’s ‘famous’ rotating lens and IR blaster for sharing photos with a select number of cameras and printers. Photo: Digital Camera Museum/Boris Jakubaschk

I have a real soft spot for Casio. In fact, I wrote an article about the company. While it was a big seller in Japan, the brand never took off in the US. What made Casio cameras great was their selection of unique modes that you wouldn’t find elsewhere at the time.

“What made Casio cameras great was their selection of unique modes that you wouldn’t find elsewhere at the time.”

Take 1998’s Exilim QV-7000SX, for example. It had an infrared transmitter, the ability to create HTML photo albums, in-camera panorama stitching and dozens of scene modes. The QV-7000SX’s support for the IrDA infrared protocol allowed it to slowly send pictures to a very small collection of compatible devices, such as the Fujifilm Z20fd or Canon SELPHY photo printers.

The photo gallery created by some Casio cameras wasn’t pretty, but it was the first of its kind. And if I may, the car pictured in photo 08290008.JPG is the most beautiful of all time. Image: Jeff Keller/DCResource

The photo album feature was very handy since few people knew how to make an interactive gallery in the late 90s. (These galleries were made for viewing from your CF card, not online.) You could view slideshows, see larger versions of pictures, and examine Exif data.

The Coupling Shot feature lets you combine two separate photos into one. Images: Casio	It takes two photos and assists you in lining up the background, like in a panorama.

Moving on, one more Casio feature worth mentioning is its Best Shot (scene) modes. The cameras had at least thirty Best Shot modes, with some cameras having seventy more on an included CD-ROM – and you could create your own! Some of the notable Best Shot modes were autumn leaves, food, eBay, and business cards. There were also several multiple exposure modes, which allowed you to add people to photos, kind of like smartphones that came 20 years later.

The MP3 player

The Fujifilm Finepix 40i with its wired remote and earbuds. Photo: DPReview

Portable music players, along with music ‘sharing’ services like Napster, gained popularity around the turn of the century. While the first iPod wouldn’t ship until 2001, camera manufacturers were already at it, like Fujifilm. The FinePix 40i shown above had a slick design and compact body but was limited by a fixed 36mm lens, a so-so SuperCCD sensor, and a hefty price tag. Music was loaded onto the camera’s SmartMedia card via proprietary software.

The Kodak mc3 is a very mediocre camera and mp3 player in one. Original image source unknown

To the best of my knowledge, there was only one camera I never reviewed due to its quality, and it was the Kodak mc3. While it was a fairly capable music player, the camera side was so bad that I couldn’t bring myself to invest the time raking Kodak over the coals.

The mc3 was a plastic camera with a fixed 37mm-equivalent F2.8 lens and a reflective LCD that could only be seen in bright outdoor light (Kodak wasn’t the only one to do this). It captured VGA-sized photos and QVGA videos with monaural sound. It lacked a remote control, so you’d have to use the hard-to-view screen to change songs. The only nice thing I can say is that it was relatively inexpensive at $299.

MP3 cameras didn’t last long, as the iPod and cheap knockoffs let cameras be cameras again.

Printer docks

One of Kodak’s many printer docks (camera usually not included). Photo: Kodak

Printer docks were accessories that I genuinely wanted to succeed. For families and older folks, they were incredibly convenient, though expensive to operate. Just pop the camera on top, pick the photo(s) you want to print using the topside controls, and let the printer do its thing for a few minutes. It could also charge the batteries in your camera.

The most famous manufacturer of printer docks was Kodak by a long shot. Kodak used dye sublimation thermal printing, and a pack of 20 sheets (the ink was ‘inside’ the paper) set you back around $15. Kodak’s printers could crank out a 4×6 print in 60-90 seconds, charge your camera’s batteries, and let you view your photos on TV.

HP’s Photosmart A447 camera on its printer dock Photo: HP

The HP pictured above could output 4×6 or 4×12-inch (panoramic) prints and used a tri-color ink cartridge (yep, no black ink). It had a button for redeye removal, which got rid of the annoyance that was common on compact cameras.

Unlike the other products in this article, the printer dock didn’t die; it just adapted to the times. Kodak, Canon, HP, and Fujifilm all make compact photo printers designed for use with smartphones. The difference is how you connect; instead of putting the camera on a dock, it’s all done wirelessly using Bluetooth.

A Fujifilm Instax Link Wide wireless photo printer. In this case, ‘wide’ means 6.1 x 9.9 cm (2.4 by 3.9 inches). Image: Fujifilm

Instant printers like Fujifilm’s Instax lineup produce card-sized, square, and wide prints, often with special effects and templates. Unlike the printer docks that use ink or dye sublimation, Instax printers work like old Polaroid instant film, so it takes a little while for your print to appear.

Android cameras

It’s 2013, and smartphone sales are taking off while consumers are starting to lose interest in compact cameras. Nikon, Samsung and even Zeiss tried giving people the best of both worlds: the ease of use and large app library of Android with photo capabilities that smartphones could not yet match.

Nikon was first out of the gate with its Coolpix 800c, which ran a version of Android (v2.3) that was already out of date. It had a 16 Megapixel BSI CMOS sensor, 10X optical zoom (25-250mm equiv.), 2GB of internal storage and a giant 3.5″ touchscreen to take advantage of Android. It had an SD card slot and a removable battery. Since battery life was dismal, having a spare on hand was a necessity.

“While a clever idea, the Coolpix 800c was not a great product.”

Aside from being unable to make calls, you could use the 800c just as you would a smartphone and nearly every Android app was at your disposal. Who knew that one day, you could e-mail your friends or browse DPReview from your camera?

While a clever idea, the Coolpix 800c was not a great product. The photo quality was lousy, it took 30 seconds to start up, it was buggy, etc. This was the last camera review I wrote for my website, DCResource. What a way to go out.

The Samsung Galaxy Camera with its 4.8″ touchscreen running Android 4. Photo: Samsung

If there was one company that should have been able to do Android cameras right, it was Samsung. It actually made two Android cameras at the opposing sides of the spectrum: the compact Galaxy Camera pictured above and the Galaxy NX, a mirrorless camera that used Samsung’s NX-mount (RIP).

The Galaxy Camera (GC) was based on Samsung’s Galaxy S III smartphone and came in two flavors: Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G/4G. Unlike the Coolpix 800c, the Galaxy Camera ran a much more modern version of Android (v4.1), and it had plenty of horsepower courtesy of a quad-core processor. It couldn’t make calls, but there was nothing to stop you from using something like Skype to chat with friends.

“If there was one company that should have been able to do Android cameras right, it was Samsung.”

Like the Nikon, the GC had a 16 Megapixel BSI CMOS sensor, but the lens was longer at 23-481mm equiv. It had a giant 4.8″ touchscreen display, making it a lot more usable than the Coolpix. As with that camera, the GC could run virtually any Android app. Samsung included three of its own for photo and video editing.

The Galaxy Camera had a slick shooting interface with virtual dials.

The Galaxy Camera was the better of the two compact Android cameras. Image quality wasn’t great, but it was more responsive, battery life was much longer, and the 3G/4G option made it usable from anywhere.

The GC apparently sold well enough for Samsung to make a sequel. The Galaxy Camera 2 had a faster processor, more RAM, NFC, and a higher-capacity battery.

Samsung exited the digital camera business in 2015, taking with it the two Galaxy Cameras and the Galaxy NX. The company sold 320 million smartphones that year.

The $6000, Android-powered Zeiss ZX1 came with Adobe Lightroom built-in. You could even use it to surf the internet. Photo: Carey Rose

On the other end of the spectrum was the Zeiss ZX1. It was introduced in 2018 but didn’t actually ship until the end of 2020. As you’d expect, it was extraordinarily expensive ($6000), and everything was high-end. It had a 37 Megapixel full-frame sensor, 35mm F2 lens, large LCD, hybrid autofocus system, and top-notch build quality. Perhaps the most interesting feature about the ZX1 is that it had Adobe Lightroom Mobile built-in. The ZX1 was unable to download other Android apps, though the target audience probably didn’t mind.

Can you think of any features from compact, DSLR or mirrorless cameras that didn’t survive beyond a generation or two? Let us know in the comments below.