Fuji DL-500 Wide
There’s so much silk screening on this camera I can hardly determine what to call it. “Fuji DL-500 WIDE Panorama” “Fuji mini wide” It is however the DL-500. The most unique feature of this camera is that it has two focal lengths 28mm and 45mm, not something in between. This arrangement is made by swinging an additional lens element internally into the light path and repositioning the lens at the same time. A button on the top of the camera toggles between the two focal lengths. Additionally the viewfinder magnification changes to give an equivalent view for the selected focal length.
With the camera set to 28mm the secondary lens element can be seen hidden away in the bottom left corner just beneath the shutter.
Here you can see the camera now set to 45mm with the additional lens element swung into place.
Samples of the two focal lengths.
I was initially pretty excited by the prospect of this camera because of the wide 28mm focal length, there are very few 35mm film point and shoots that have lenses this wide. But the image quality of the lens in either focal length is not particularly good. The images are quite soft and there is a great amount of vignetting especially with the 28mm setting. That said though it is compact, light weight and 28mm.
Two more quick notes about this camera. It requires two batteries to operate. A CR123A 3V lithium battery but also a CR2025 that is located inside the back of the camera. Both are required unlike some cameras that use the smaller battery just for date imprint functions. Also in order to set the mask for panorama images you need to open the back and make that change inside the camera, for obvious reasons you can only do this before you start shooting. I may give this camera another try in the future but if I do I will try closer distances and see if that makes a difference in the images, street photography perhaps.