Name: 三菱DJ-1000：世界上最小的數碼相機（1997年！）。 (Mitsubishi DJ-1000: World's Smallest Digital Camera (in 1997!))
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Greetings and welcome to an LGR camera thing!

And this is the Mitsubishi DJ-1000 digital still camera, costing $249 US dollars when

And yep, that is the same Mitsubishi that you may know for their cars and trucks, although

Mitsubishi Electric was and is a massive company, with dozens of branches, subdivisions, and

And of course one of those divisions made digital cameras in the ‘90s, but it seems

The DJ-1000, or DJ-1 as it was sometimes called, was Mitsubishi’s one and only consumer digital

camera, one of the most unique of its kind in 1997.

It was by far the smallest and lightest-weight digital camera in the world when it was announced

at PC Expo ‘97 in New York, weighing in at just 2.8 ounces or 80 grams.

But it also didn’t receive widespread distribution, initially sold exclusively through T-Zone

stores in the US, of which there were only two when the DJ-1000 hit the market.

It also saw distribution in Mitsubishi’s home country of Japan as you’d expect, and

in Europe under the Umax brand where it was known as the Umax PhotoRun.

But yeah, these days you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone that remembers the DJ-1000

at all, much less owned one, so I was more than happy to find this one new, complete in box.

Inside is a neatly-packed plastic bag full of goodies, a cardboard tray with memory card

stuff, and finally the camera encased in bubble wrap.

And man, I knew this thing was gonna be small, but wow.

It’s about the size of a deck of cards, able to fit happily inside a shirt pocket.

Compare this to the most popular digital camera of 1997, the Sony FD Mavica, and the difference

Granted the Mavica used 3.5” floppy disks, so maybe comparing it to the something like

the Fuji DS-7 is more appropriate, but still.

Even against that the DJ-1000 remains miniscule, which is extra impressive considering the

Fuji uses SmartMedia cards and the Mitsubishi uses CompactFlash.

Yeah that’s right, the thinnest camera on the market used the thickest memory card format

It came with this two megabyte memory card in the box, easily the lowest capacity CF

This version of the package also came with this PCMCIA card adapter, ideal for laptop

users, though from what I’ve read Mitsubishi also offered a desktop package with another adapter.

As for the bag of goodies you get the photo retrieval software for both Windows 3.1 and

95 in English and Japanese, a very blue soft-cover carrying case that holds that camera quite

snugly, a wrist strap that attaches to the right-hand side of the camera, and several

bits of documentation in both English and Japanese.

I especially dig this instruction booklet, with its automobile service manual aesthetic

and a message saying that it is important to you.

Although of all the cameras I’ve covered, this is the ultimate in terms of simplicity,

so almost all of this information pertains to using the DJ-1000 software for Windows.

And well, looking at the camera you can see why.

There’s almost nothing going on here, you just turn it on, point, and shoot.

No settings to set, no adjustments to adjust, nothing but a power switch and a shutter button.

There’s not even a flash on the front, only a passthrough window for the viewfinder and

its tiny camera lens, a 5.8mm fixed focus lens with an aperture of 2.8 and an auto shutter

speed ranging from 1/60 to 1/15,000 of a second.

On top is the shutter button and the power switch and along the bottom is where you insert

And then there’s the back of the camera which is covered in a surprising amount of text.

Guess they didn’t have anywhere else to put this stuff so why not, because there’s

Just the viewfinder, a spot to install two triple-A batteries, and this pair of LEDs.

Since there’s no LCD screen and no sound from the shutter, these are your only indications

that anything is going right or wrong with the DJ-1000.

The top red LED lets you know if there’s card activity or the battery is low, and the

bottom LED flashes green, red, or some combination of the two to indicate memory card status.

When you power it on the lights all light up and then the bottom LED turns green if

Press the shutter and you’ll see the top LED turn red.

When you’re running low on memory the bottom LED lights up green and red, then solid red

for the final shot, and eventually it’ll flash red when it’s full.

The two megabyte card holds fifteen photos, but it supports CompactFlash cards up to fifteen

megabytes, which provides an image capacity of 113.

Interesting to note that one of these high-capacity cards would’ve cost more than the camera

itself back in ‘97, at around $260 apiece.

And you really wanted a second card back then because there is no way to delete photos from

the camera, so it’s either swap cards or transfer your images to a computer.

Once you’ve taken some pictures it’s time to develop them through a Windows PC.

And yes I do mean develop, since this stores images in a proprietary file format exclusive

So even though it uses a standard CF card that’s readable on a modern PC, you still

need the DJ-1000 Viewer software that it came with.

Otherwise all you’ll see is a folder with a bunch of DAT files, so open up the Viewer

It’ll then read the photos, generate thumbnails, and from here you can convert them into standard

As usual with older cameras I enjoy taking photos of things that would’ve been around

when it was new, in this case the late 1990s.

And yeah, for that purpose this camera fits the bill wonderfully.

There’s something about that early consumer digital camera aesthetic that charms the pants

And the DJ-1000 in particular has a look to it that made it really fun to play with over

The image quality isn’t too bad, though the saturation is always low and the color

It also has this particular type of spotty pixelation and dithering that becomes more

apparent on vivid, solid colors, kinda looks like an early FMV game.

Take a look at this comparison to my phone’s camera and you get an idea of how it’s affecting things.

Makes it pretty exciting to take pictures and get ‘em onto a PC so you can see what

unpredictable weirdness you ended up with.

Then there’s the way it handles specular highlights and lighting of a certain range

You get these green streaks protruding downward from anything bright enough, like reflecting