Cool Camera

So, I went to Fujifilm.com today to see if they still produce the film that I wish to use for the Color Fest in March, and I discovered that they have been the first to think of something I have been wishing for for several years now.

The coolest looking digital camera yet:


Now, it isn't quite the camera I want to buy. For instance, it does not have a full frame digital sensor. This camera is obviously aimed at the pro-sumer market of retro tech-geeks, but there are good reasons why I wish that I could get something like this.

In my experience, I have found that people are super impressed when you carry around a huge, 15 pound monstrosity of a camera with all kinds of atavistic bells, whistles, attachments, and a ginormous, phallic lens. People say, "Wow! That is a nice camera. How did you afford that?" But, besides being a pain in the rear for the photographer to deal with, I also find that people get terribly intimidated when they find themselves in front of that beast.

On the other hand, if I point my humble Nikon FM at them:


They let their guard down. They don't take it quite as seriously, maybe. They say things like, "You have to know what you're doing to use a camera like that." They give you some sort of benefit of the doubt. Therefore it is a lot easier to take their picture when your ridiculous camera is not getting in the way.

Furthermore, most of that expensive camera is dedicated to doing tasks that a camera doesn't really need to do, like color balance, and creating histograms, and other esoteric nonsense that can be taken care of with computers, photoshop, etc. And that is why I have wished that Nikon would release a Nikon FM-Dslr. In a perfect world it would use the minimum necessary electronics to capture and store a Nikon Raw image file with a full frame sensor. It wouldn't even need to have a view screen on the back. I could do without that. It would have a knob on top for the shutter speed, and ISO, and would accomodate all Nikon manual lenses, therefore removing the need for aperture adjustment, and auto-focus mechanisms in the camera body.

It would have absolutely no automatic settings, except maybe a TTL flash setting. It would be the first fully manual, stripped down, professional DSLR on the market. It would sell exceptionally well to pro-sumer retro geeks, and me. It would be awesome.