Hands-On: Fujifilm W3 3D Point-and-Shoot Camera Inches Towards the Mainstream [HandsOn]

Fujifilm’s first splash into pocketable 3D picture making, the W1, was beset by complicated controls and general first-generation awkwardness. With its successor, the W3, Fujifilm has lessened but not eliminated the headache both of creating and viewing your 3D content.

Introducing the camera at the yankee Museum of Natural History last night, Fujifilm said that the arrival of 3DTVs effectively put 3D in ” every household.” That’s away from true. Home 3D, and especially home 3D creation, remains a great deal a fledgling technology, and if you would like people to buy a pocketable camera that shoots 3D, for now, you’re going to have got to give them a compelling screen to observe 3D on.

The W3 (née Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D W3) does just that, stretching its 16:9 parallax barrier LCD to a few.5 inches. It’s nice and massive and the 3D effect, especially after you’re reviewing 3D photographers that you simply’ve already taken, is convincing and enjoyable. No glasses required! Video looks OK, too, alternating between satisfying 3D effect and one of those holographic, spectral three dimensionality, but generally the LCD was too small to keep track what was happening. This on-the-camera 3D experience is solid enough, but Fujifilm also added HDMI 1.4 for finding out your content on a pleasant big 3DTV. It’s here where you’ll be reminded that you just’re no James Cameron.

While an aesthetic disparity has and should always exist between photographers who have the eye-a sense of composition, lighting, arrangement, subject, etc-and those that don’t, never has the eye mattered as much as it does whenever you’re producing things in 3D. The Fujifilm execs reminded us persistently, like schoolchildren who learn best through repetition, that ” depth, depth, depth” is the most important to making good 3D. I heard one Fujifilm employee jokingly scold an older gentleman for not allowing the strongly suggested six feet between the camera and the foreground subject of the photo.

And so, at the very least after you’re getting started, the 3D belongings you make is a mixed bag. A shot of Central Park I snapped out the window looked OK-each of the buildings inside the distance were basically on an analogous plane and the trees inside the front were on another, like the set of a high school play that’s presupposed to occur in Manhattan. A shot of a crowd of folk was less successful, the multiple distinct points of depth inside the scene resulting in a form of muddled quality. But a head-on shot of a mastodon, or some other prehistoric tusked beast, was like Night at the Museum in 3D. The tusks shot out of the camera’s LCD smoothly and continuously, and the effect on the Sony 3DTV I plugged into (with the Active Shutter glasses, sadly) was even more impressive. ” That’s a superb one,” said a lady standing nearby. My first successful 3D picture! It felt good.

But the 3D 720p video was type of a wash, especially when viewed on the TVs. No less than within the museum setting, I couldn’t quite find any moving subjects that actually made things pop, and my clips were mostly confused and crowded. And it’s worth noting that while shooting the videos-and, to a lesser extent, still photos-the LCD screen doesn’t quite show you the general product but some pre-3D-magicked mash-up of the photographs of the two lenses, so you’re never quite sure how what you’re seeing will compare to what ends up in your memory card. For videos, this was especially jarring, and looking to monitor what you were shooting on the W3′s LCD, before it was properly compiled for 3D, was at best annoying and at worst nauseating.

Of course, beneath the intriguing 3D surface you’ll find a standard, mostly lousy 2D point-and-shoot. The W3 has the same guts as the W1-same 10MP CCD sensor, same RealPhoto processor, same dual 3x optical zoom lenses-though the body of the camera has been slimmed and streamlined appreciably, made more round and no more boxy. And it’s adopted controls which are considerably easier to address than the W1-just like Fujifilm’s non-3D point-and-shoots but still sometimes a piece confusing for many of the W3′s unique features, like advanced 2D where possible set different focus or ISO for each lens and snap two distinct photos simultaneously.

The W3 shall be available in September for $500-$100 under the W1 when it debuted last year. And while it’s 3D isn’t a home run in any way, it usually is very effective inside the right situations, and the way in which Fujifilm has packaged it inside the W3 should make it as attractive as ever to a public that’s increasingly happy with dabbling within the (sometimes optically uncomfortable) third dimension. [Fujifilm]

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This post is tagged: camera, HandsOn, inches, mainstream, PointAndShoot, Towards