Kyocera shows tiny 3-megapixel camera

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by Martyn Williams

(IDG) -- Hardly a week goes by without the arrival of a digital still camera that breaks some type of record. This week's model: the Kyocera Finecam 3300, which the company claims is the smallest and lightest full-featured 3-megapixel camera so far.

Most of today's consumer-oriented digital cameras offer resolutions in the neighborhood of 1 million or 2 million pixels, so Kyocera's new 3-megapixel camera represents the next generation of image quality. Like a PC screen or a high-definition TV picture, higher resolution means a better overall image.

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Camera enthusiasts interested in a shot at the Finecam 3000 may have to wait: It ships first in Japan, on September 15. The estimated price is $735.

So just how light and small is this camera? Kyocera says the Finecam 3300 weighs less than a half pound and measures 3.74 inches by 2.64 inches by 1.5 inches, slightly larger than the Canon Digital Ixus (see "Digital camera fits in wallet," link below). However, the Ixus -- called the Digital Ixy in Japan -- is a 2-megapixel camera, so if you're looking for a small camera you'll have to make a trade-off between size and resolution.

Lots of options

A special feature on the new Finecam is the video-shooting mode. If you can live with a limited resolution of 320 by 240 pixels, the camera will take 15 images per second for a maximum of 15 seconds. That's a total of 225 successive images, stored as a video file that you can download and view on a desktop computer.

Other features include a 2X optical zoom lens, a 2X digital zoom lens, and a color 1.5-inch liquid crystal display that lets you view your latest masterpieces.

The camera primarily stores images on a Type 1 or Type 2 CompactFlash media card, but it also supports both the 340-MB and 1-GB versions of IBM's Microdrive (see "IBM packs 1GB into stamp-size drive," link below).

The Microdrives might come in handy if you use the camera's highest quality image mode, which records images directly in TIFF format, rather than in JPEG. The JPEG format compresses images and can cause some detail to be lost; the TIFF-RGB mode results in high-quality, 2048-by-1536 pixel images that are a whopping 9.5MB in size.

Other shooting modes include super-fine, fine, and normal. The super-fine and normal settings both take images at 2048-by-1536 pixel resolution, but then they use different methods of compression. The normal mode takes images at a 1024-by-768 pixel resolution.

Other features include four strobe modes (automatic flash, red-eye reduced flash, forced flash, and flash prohibited), a distant view mode, color mode (color, sepia, monochrome), and white balance selection (auto, daylight, tungsten lamp, cloudy, fluorescent lamp, preset).

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Kyocera Finecam 3300
Canon Digital Ixus

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