Fuji W3 Camera Review

I've gone 3D by firstly buying a 3D TV and then buying a 3D camera, the Fuji Film Real 3d W3.

The TV is fantastic. The camera is also great. Some observations.

Photographically:


 - technically this isn't 3D of course, I cannot walk behind the photo: its stereography

 - subjects that are not in focus will not fuse

 - subjects closer than about 1.5m / 4ft will not fuse
 - to get the best 3D effect best to have elements that step into the background, not continuous
 - due to parallax decreasing with distance, you won't get much stereoscopic effect on objects further away than about 200m
 - the above means you won't need the zoom much


Camera features - the good:
 - the auto-stereoscopic screen is really very good, much better than I expected
 - I like having some scene modes
 - 10 megapixel is plenty
 - the image guides are useful to aide composition


Camera features - some minor nits:
 - it eats battery, probably I'll need a spare for a day's shooting
 - for some reason turning off the sounds (shutter, button presses etc) turns the flash off
 - it doesn't come with a mini-HDMI lead, shame when they are like $5 on Ebay
 - when it goes to sleep it starts from fresh, even with the lens cover open
 - its very easy to get your fingers in the frame of view
 - the 35-105 equivalent lens is not wide enough for cityscapes
 - it uses a non-standard USB connector


See if you can get these example pictures working:

Because the first two are quite busy, it may be hard to allow your eyes to get to the required position, so I've added a visual cue, the stub pointing out of the top.


One challenge with free viewing is that the for most folks, the set of the eyes gives an optical base of 65mm to 70mm, which means that the corresponding image points cannot be any further apart than 65mm to 70mm. So the examples above should fuse fairly easily. Here's one I've resized in Photoshop, such that with my laptop on my lap, it just fuses:

It should just fit in my blogger layout. If it doesn't, click the image and view at 100%.


One final note: parallax (which is being used here) is but one of a range of techniques used by the brain to calculate depth. It also uses size and shape, lighting and other cues.