Fuji Dl Super Mini Zoom
After all the good results from my Fuji DL mini I had high hopes for this new acquisition the Fuji DL Super Mini Zoom. Unfortunately the lens is not up to the same standard. While both provide 28mm the Mini Zoom adds an additional 2X zooming to 56mm. In doing that it gives up the f3.5 aperture for f4.5 and also significantly some image quality despite its 7 elements in 6 groups with one aspherical element. What it does retain though is the manual focus and exposure compensation from the DL mini all nice features not found on many other point and shoots. You can see on my camera the previous owner had mounted a textured strip to aid in opening the clam shell as well as not seen in the picture a foam bumper presumably to keep their glasses from getting scratched at the viewfinder. I’ve elected to leave them on the camera.
Perhaps I am being a little harsh on the camera, from the entire roll there are only a few images that are particularly soft and they are of distant landscapes where the camera almost seems to have focused on the foreground. That might be solvable by selecting infinity focus in those cases.
Most of the other images are much better although not as good as I would have expected from the Dl Mini’s 28mm lens but then this is a zoom. On a final note the camera is extremely well built and the clam shell design is a nice elegant touch.
January 13th, 2019 at 2:20 pm
Not sure what you mean by lens quality. I never used the DL Mini but this one has always been great (by P&S standards that is, and by that I mean the T4 types not cheap ones). And it is unique in how it was designed and programmed, especially for its day. Also can’t see in the photos what you mean either, perhaps scans don’t do differences the justice?
January 26th, 2019 at 2:23 pm
Hello John the DL mini has superior image quality over this zoom version. The images I present on my blog are typically low resolution versions however sometimes I will do higher resolution crops. In this case I’ve only shown low resolution images from the zoom. Images from the DL mini just have more pop much like the Yashica T3. Perhaps I could do a little more in depth comparison at some point.